Where a leader sits shapes how they perform. Evaluations may show the same leader underperforming in one organization and excelling in another. Same capability, different environment, different result.
Boards and owners hiring senior leaders tend to scrutinize the candidate. Their own leadership conditions deserve equal scrutiny.
Leadership Conditions Shape Leadership Output
Capable leaders do their best work when decision-making is clear, candor is welcomed and the mandate carries authority. When those conditions are absent, the same leader becomes cautious, deferential and eventually disengaged.
The consequences are costly: executive retention suffers and the return on a first-year investment erodes before the hire has a chance to perform.
|
“One CFO we came to know well was described by her previous employer as hesitant and slow to commit. Leadership there reversed her decisions in board meetings, so she learned to wait before acting. In her next role, the CEO made clear in her first week which decisions she owned and asked her to challenge the plan. Within a year, she had led a refinancing and rebuilt the finance team. Her former employer was accurate in their assessment. But her caution was a response to the environment they created, which didn’t allow them to see her full capability.” – Dan Plourde, Senior Vice President & Principal |
Harvard Business School researchers tracked 20 former GE executives who went on to become chairman or CEO of other companies and found strikingly uneven results. They concluded that even the best management talent transfers only when it fits the challenges of the new environment.1 |
The Organization Deserves the Same Scrutiny
Most executive assessments focus on the candidate: reference checks, competency interviews, track record review. An equally rigorous set of questions about the organization belongs in the same conversation.
How decisions are made at the top, whether the incoming executive holds real authority over the mandate and what the last person in the role encountered matter as much as any competency assessment. A candidate who asks these questions before accepting is exercising the same diligence a board should apply before extending the offer.
What This Means for Leadership
Organizations that attract and retain exceptional leaders share a characteristic rarely named in a job description: conditions in which strong people are safe to perform at their best. The foundation is a clear mandate, tolerance for candor that surfaces problems early and leaders who welcome disagreement.
When a search produces an executive who underperforms, the instinct is to revisit the hiring decision. A more useful step is to examine what the environment told that leader in the first ninety days and whether it welcomed their full capability. Every board can ask itself one thing: would a strong leader feel safe telling us we are wrong?
The same leader. Two different outcomes. The difference is often the environment.
1 Boris Groysberg, Andrew N. McLean and Nitin Nohria, “Are Leaders Portable?” Harvard Business Review, May 2006.
Contributor
