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Half of executive hires fail within 18 months.
After years sitting across the table from boards, founders, and CHROs, I’ve started to understand why. They’re all trying to do the same thing: look into their crystal ball and answer one question. What will predict someone being a great leader?
You’d think we’d have cracked this by now. There’s no shortage of frameworks, assessments, and bestselling books on the topic. Yet multiple independent studies—from the Center for Creative Leadership to Heidrick & Struggles—keep landing on that same brutal number. (Sources below.)
Something is clearly not working. But what?
The presence trap
A common mistake I see people make is confusing presence with substance. Or in other words, judging the wine by the label.
There’s a certain type of candidate who interviews brilliantly. Sounds articulate and confident, they have that “gravitas” that everyone seems to be looking for. They command a room and make you feel like they’ve got everything figured out.
But in reality, they might not be what you need.
Don’t get me wrong, charisma matters and can absolutely co-exist with expertise. However, the former is too often used as a proxy for the latter. Causing expensive mistakes.
Testing someone on “making a good impression” during a 60-minute interview is like predicting a marriage by the wedding day. Likability gets you in the door, but it doesn’t help you with the day-to-day reality of making tricky trade-offs when resources are scarce. Or staying curious when the initial strategy is failing and you have to pivot, fast.
It’s natural for candidates to sell themselves as best they can. What I see, and what research confirms happens too often, is companies over-indexing on presence and under-indexing on the things that actually matter.
What the research shows
My background is in psychology. One thing that frustrated me when I moved into executive search was how little the industry relies on actual evidence. We have decades of research on leadership effectiveness. Most of it gets ignored in favour of gut feel and pattern matching.
So what actually holds up?
Self-awareness is foundational, but rare. Organisational psychologist Tasha Eurich found that while 95% of people think they’re self-aware, only 10-15% actually are. More recent Harvard Business Review research puts the correlation between actual and self-perceived competence at less than 30%.
Leaders who lack genuine self-awareness build teams in their own image. They miss their blind spots. They create cultures where bad news never travels upward.
Cognitive flexibility beats raw intelligence. The ability to update your thinking when new information arrives. To hold contradictory ideas without your ego getting in the way. To change course when the situation demands it.
In fast-moving environments, this separates leaders who adapt from those who double down on failing strategies.
Attitudes drive most failures, not skills. Leadership IQ tracked over 20,000 new hires and found that 89% of failures came down to attitude: coachability, emotional intelligence, motivation, temperament. Only 11% were due to lack of technical skills.
The same study found that 82% of hiring managers saw warning signs during the interview but ignored them. Too focused on credentials. Too pressed for time.
None of this is groundbreaking. But look at how most executive hiring actually works, and you’ll see these factors are rarely assessed with any rigour.
Instead, we get seduced by track records.
The track record problem
“They scaled a company from €20M to €200M.”
Sounds impressive. Maybe it is. But track records are noisy.
The question that rarely gets asked: what was the context? Were they leading during a rising tide that lifted all boats? Did they inherit a strong team and a clear strategy? Were they the driving force, or were they surrounded by people who did the heavy lifting?
I’ve seen executives with stellar CVs fail spectacularly because their previous success was situational. They were right for a specific context that doesn’t match the one they’re walking into.
The turnaround specialist who thrives in crisis but can’t build for the long term. The growth executive who’s great with abundant resources but panics when capital dries up. The big-company operator who can run a machine but can’t build one from scratch.
Past performance isn’t irrelevant. But it’s only useful if you understand why someone succeeded, not just that they did.
What I actually look for
After years of doing this, here’s what I’ve learned to pay attention to.
How do they talk about failure? Everyone has them. What matters is whether they can discuss them with genuine reflection or just rehearsed spin. Leaders who can articulate what they got wrong, what they learned, and what they’d do differently—those are the ones who actually improve over time.
What questions do they ask? Are they genuinely trying to understand the situation, the culture, the challenges? Or are they just performing intelligence? The best leaders I’ve placed were almost obsessively curious about what they were walking into.
How do they talk about their teams? “I built a team that achieved X” versus “My team achieved X.” Small difference in phrasing, big difference in how they operate. Leaders who consistently claim credit for collective work tend to struggle retaining strong people.
What’s their relationship with uncertainty? Some leaders need to project certainty even when they don’t have it. Others can say “I don’t know yet, but here’s how I’d figure it out.” In complex environments, the second type makes better decisions.
Can they disagree with you in the room? I watch how candidates handle friction during the interview itself. Do they push back when they disagree, or do they smooth things over? Leaders who can’t challenge someone they’re trying to impress won’t have the difficult conversations the role demands.
The culture question
“Culture fit” is a phrase I hear constantly. It’s often code for “someone we’d enjoy having a beer with.” Which is a problem.
Culture matters, but not in the way people think. What actually matters is alignment on values and working norms. Not similarity of personality or background. Too much similarity is usually a liability. Homogeneous leadership teams have blind spots. They confirm each other’s assumptions instead of challenging them.
Better question: “Will they strengthen our culture in the ways we need?” Sometimes that means someone who challenges existing norms. Sometimes it means someone who reinforces what’s working. Depends on what the organisation actually needs, not on whether the candidate reminds the hiring committee of themselves.
Why this keeps happening
If the evidence is clear, why do companies keep getting it wrong?
Time pressure. Executive hiring often happens under duress. Someone left. Growth is creating gaps. The pressure to fill the seat leads to shortcuts.
Anchoring on credentials. It’s easier to evaluate pedigree than actual capability. “INSEAD and McKinsey” feels safe, even when it’s not relevant.
Interview theatre. Traditional interviews reward performance. Interestingly, recent meta-analyses (Sackett et al., 2022) found that structured interviews actually have the highest predictive validity of any common selection tool. But that validity varies enormously depending on how they’re designed and conducted. Most aren’t structured. Most reward polish over substance.
Confirmation bias. Once a committee gets excited about someone, everything gets interpreted through a positive lens. Red flags become “manageable concerns.”
Wrong people assessing. Sometimes the decision-makers don’t know what great looks like for this specific role. They know what impressive looks like in general. Not the same thing.
A different approach
No perfect formula here. Leadership is contextual. But a few shifts would help.
Start with context, not the role. Before defining the ideal candidate, get specific about the situation. What’s the real challenge? What does the team already have? What’s missing? What kind of leader has failed here before, and why?
Assess for the future, not just the past. Track records matter, but learning agility matters more. Things change too fast to assume what worked before will work again.
Look for specifics, not impressions. Instead of “are they strategic?”, ask “tell me about a time you changed strategy based on new information. Walk me through how you thought about it.”
Build in friction. The process should include real challenge. Not adversarial grilling, but genuine conversation where candidates have to think on their feet and handle disagreement.
Reference differently. Forget “what are their strengths and weaknesses?” Ask about specific situations. “When things got difficult, how did they show up? What surprised you? Who did they struggle with, and why?”
The uncomfortable bit
Most executive hiring optimises for reducing risk rather than finding the best person. Companies hire candidates who look safe on paper, interview well, and won’t embarrass anyone if things go south.
But leadership is inherently risky.
The candidates who will actually transform your organisation often don’t fit the mould. Unusual backgrounds. Uncomfortable questions. They push back in interviews.
The best hiring decisions I’ve been part of were ones where the client was willing to think differently about what they actually needed. Not “who looks like a leader” but “who will lead us where we need to go.”
Ask harder questions.
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