Why transitions fail

Given this climate, how are these leaders faring? And what can coaches do to help? In , the Institute of Executive Development and the global coaching alliance Alexcel reported results of a year-long market study designed to examine transitions that senior-most leaders those executives in the top five percent of their organizations make and to identify what helps them succeed and what causes them to fail. Participants included approximately executives and talent professionals from more than organizations in 12 countries and 21 industries.

Participants took an online survey consisting of 18 multiple choice questions, plus a number of deep-dive interviews, specifically on the subject of internal and external transitions, how many failed, and why they failed. This is consistent with and perhaps even more optimistic than results from some other studies, particularly those that focused on the entire executive population.

What was even more noteworthy was our finding that one in five senior leaders taking on new roles within their existing organization failed. The clear message here is that what makes a leader successful in one role in the organization will not necessarily continue to drive his or her success in the next role.

Why did so many of the senior-most leaders fail to make successful transitions? The top two reasons cited by organizations we surveyed were lack of interpersonal skills and lack of personal skills. Note: Each survey respondent could choose to cite more than one cause of executive failure.

Only 15 percent of respondents said leaders within their organization failed due to lack of technical or business skills. The highest cause of failure was leadership skill deficits, reported by 68 percent of organizations. So what can companies and executive coaches do to help? We gathered information on what companies are doing and what they deemed effective.

Online onboarding and meet-and-greets are helpful for external hires, but clearly not sufficient for senior leaders. With leaders new to a company, mentoring programs and informal networks with other executives were the support modalities perceived as most effective.

Customized assimilation plans and executive coaching were also helpful. For internally transitioning leaders, the supports perceived as most effective were executive coaching and the creation of a customized assimilation plan. To illustrate this point, think about cooking a meal. You need to practice over time in order to gradually convert your knowledge into ability.

However, software transitions are often approached as though they should be part of the simple domain: expecting clear cause-and-effect relationships, mechanically applying best practices, setting up a predefined plan and then simply executing it.

This requires us to have a clear goal in mind while also remaining humble enough to accept that our assumptions might be incorrect and that our actions can have unintended consequences. Rather than a cookbook, we needed principles! Two of the principles might already sound quite familiar, and as with the original manifesto, while we give due emphasis to the items on the right, we focus more on the items on the left:. The next step in our transition was to build a mixed team consisting of members from both the incumbent group and the receiving party.

This left us with a huge team of 20 members, so we immediately split this down into two mixed teams. This split was made between the two products that were developed by the original team, meaning we now had two cross-functional mixed teams that were each handling a single product. Carrying out the software transition was now the responsibility of these new teams, who decided on the next most valuable steps for a successful transition. This contrasts with seeing the transition as an externally steered transfer activity.

In this setup, knowledge — and even more importantly, ability — were now continually emerging among the members of the receiving party. This has more similarities with the biological process of osmosis, where a substance gradually flows from one region to another naturally, without any external push or pull.

We made sure that each team had a team coach in our case a Scrum Master , who was also aware of the intercultural aspects of the collaboration. Over time, this enabled the receiving party to take over end-to-end ownership of elements of the product. We put a lot of emphasis on developing real end-to-end ownership, in contrast to the team only being responsible for certain phases of product development like discovery or implementation.

We started the transition with a short, intense series of knowledge transfer sessions, afterwards switching to a more hands-on approach where team members from the receiving party quickly started to work on product backlog items in sprints.

To support the emergence of abilities, we applied best practices from agile software development like pair programming and mob programming. Getting people from the incumbent and receiving parties to collaborate actively in sprints helped tremendously. We started by defining the relevant product development ability areas and developed a scale that included examples of observable behaviour e.

We then ran reflection sessions at monthly intervals, where team members assessed their own product development abilities.

While this approach is clearly not an accurate scientific process, it did create valuable insights into our progress. As with the Agile Manifesto, documentation can refer to documents written before or after implementing code. Classical software transition approaches try to create lots of documentation even before a single line of code is written. This can go as far as writing low-level design documents in a futile effort to make sure that the receiving party knows exactly what to implement.

On the other hand, extensive system documentation is also often created and seen as the main medium for transferring knowledge. Plus, we added some of our own experience into what executives say behind the scenes. As a result, we identified five support factors that were most important.

These approaches are not mutually exclusive. Stepping into an executive role is like being asked to fly a plane, despite never having done it before. You might have ridden on the plane, worked in a support role, and understand how the plane works.

A totally different experience. Not only may you not have some key skills, but some of your previous instincts may be wrong. At this level, executive leadership skills change radically. You may have to unlearn things that were previously strengths, because they can become liabilities at this level. New leaders can get their footing much faster by understanding where they need to pull back, where to focus, and where they need to add something new to their leadership repertoire.

They seldom proactively ask for help, but when asked, are quick to say that they wish they had more of it. So why the hesitation? It turns out that support actually can move at the speed of executive performance.

The leaders who make it to the executive ranks are typically very driven and accustomed to success. With these high expectations, they often forget how important it is to coach and be coached.

So why does it evaporate at the senior level? Several reasons. One is certainly the time pressure. The second is often cultural. Senior executives may expect newer executives to figure it out for themselves, as they may have had to do. Most new executives struggle privately, worrying that admitting a weakness could cost them their job or credibility.

So they say nothing until it may be too late. Otherwise, they may let a tremendous amount of time, money, and talent go to waste. As leaders struggle through their executive transitions, the number-one thing they ask for is an external executive coach.

With an external coach, they may be more honest about their challenges, without fear that it will affect their career path. Even more importantly, an external coach can help them gain an objective perspective. Often, executives are so focused inward that they believe they are the only ones with these struggles. And they beat themselves up for not being better. But the reality is that most executives fall into the same common pitfalls.

An executive coach who has worked with dozens or hundreds of executives can quickly help the new executive spot the pitfalls ahead. And they can help them develop strategies to navigate these complex challenges. The warning, however, is that most companies wait too long. We often get calls from companies who are looking to rescue an executive. In our study, one of the most common things we heard from executives with successful transitions was that they knew what success looked like.

They knew what they would be judged on and what skill sets they needed.