CEO succession: Avoiding the unanticipated Domino Effect

Day 42: A newly hired Group Strategy Director is still at her desk at 9:00 p.m. She was brought in to lead a major transformation - one that’s been discussed for months but never clearly defined. She was hired because she’s capable, and there’s often an unspoken belief that capable leaders should just “get it” and move.

Her inbox is overflowing. Priorities keep shifting. Her peers are polite but distant - unclear on her mandate, protective of their turf, and too busy to engage deeply. Conversations stay surface-level.

She’s been invited in - but not set up to succeed.

It’s a common story: a strong leader, dropped into a high-stakes role without the clarity, structure, or support to land well.

Whether new to the company or stepping into a bigger role, many executives spend their critical first months navigating complexity alone - while being expected to deliver from day one.

Research has held steady for years: around 40% of leadership transitions fail within 18 months when the right support isn’t in place.

Too often, companies focus on choosing the right person - then overlook what it takes to truly integrate them. Without structured, human-centered support, even the most capable leaders struggle to succeed.

Why this matters more now

Transitions have always been high-stakes moments. But in today’s climate, the pressure is rising and the timelines are shrinking.

Leaders are stepping in during disruption - not stability.

Most aren’t inheriting status quo - they’re hired to fix or accelerate something.

Hybrid work delays trust-building and blurs cultural cues.

Visibility is high. Expectations form early and often.

In short: less room for error. More risk when it goes wrong.

Different paths. Same risks.

It’s tempting to think internal promotions are easier. But each path comes with invisible traps:

External hires lack historical context and relationships yet are expected to drive change.

Internal promotions bring familiarity but struggle to reset relationships and lead differently.

In both cases, leaders are often left navigating ambiguity alone once onboarding ends.

What’s missing

Most organizations do onboarding. Few do transitions. And that’s where things break down.

What’s often overlooked:

 
• A clear and aligned mandate
 
• Shared definitions of success across key stakeholders
 
• Insight into unspoken cultural and political dynamics
 
• Active sponsorship from the manager
 
• A longer runway to build trust and momentum
 
• Board-level clarity and engagement for senior roles

The result? Leaders are under pressure to perform - while still finding their footing.

The quiet rejection

Leaders are often hired to shift the system. But once inside, they encounter subtle resistance:

• Their pace feels too fast.
 
• Their questions challenge norms.
 
• Their style doesn’t match unspoken rules.

Suddenly, trust is withheld. Expectations shift. Peers disengage - but don’t say why. The very qualities that got them hired now work against them. Confidence erodes. Performance stalls. And promising transitions quietly derail.

This isn’t just an onboarding issue. It’s a readiness issue - on both sides.

The cost of getting it wrong

A failed executive transition doesn’t just impact the individual - it ripples across the organization. It stalls momentum, fractures teams, delays results, and undermines trust in leadership.

It’s also expensive. Between lost productivity, re-recruitment, and missed goals, the cost can easily reach several times the leader’s salary.

When transitions go off course, it’s not just a talent issue - it’s a business one.

What needs to change

Organizations that get transitions right do five things well:

1. Treat transitions as enterprise critical. Ask: What’s at stake beyond this one role?
 
2. Define success together. Ask: Are expectations aligned across leader, manager, and stakeholders?
 
3. Equip the manager to lead the transition. Ask: Are they prepared to sponsor - not just evaluate?
 
4. Provide real support - not just warm welcomes. Ask: Have we created space for the leader to reflect, adapt, and build capability?
 
5. Extend support beyond day 90. Ask: What happens after the honeymoon ends?

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The gray zone

Most leadership transitions don’t fail during onboarding - they stall in the murky middle. That stretch between onboarding and full performance. Too late for checklists, too early for formal reviews, and too often overlooked.

This is when the leader is highly visible but still gaining footing. The system assumes they’re up and running. But what they actually need is time to reflect, context to navigate, and support to show up differently.

Without that space, small misalignments become big ones. First impressions stick. And promising transitions quietly derail - not because the leader isn’t capable, but because they’re left to navigate complexity alone.

This “gray zone” isn’t anyone’s job to manage - and that’s the problem.

The role of transition coaching

Transition coaching provides a confidential, strategic space to:

• Navigate unspoken dynamics
 
• Build confidence and clarity
 
• Reflect and recalibrate in real time

As Greg Smith, CEO of Teradyne, put it:

“We’re investing in executive coaching because we want our senior leaders to lead with confidence from day one—not figure it out by month six.”

And the research backs it up. Coaching accelerates traction, strengthens alignment, and improves long-term performance.

But it only works when paired with system-level readiness: aligned stakeholders, engaged managers, and a clear plan for integration.

Final thought

Transitions aren’t just about setting a leader up to succeed. They’re a mirror for whether your organization is ready to evolve.

Because every new leader brings change - and every transition is a test of how well your system absorbs it.

If you’re hiring or promoting this year, the question isn’t just “is this the right person?”

It’s “are we ready to change with them?”

BTS helps leaders - and the systems around them - thrive through transition. Let’s talk.

Sources

 
1. McKinsey & Company (2023), Leadership Transitions: Making the Move from Operational to Strategic
 
2. Harvard Business Review (Ciampa & Watkins, 1999), Right From the Start
 
3. CEB/Gartner Executive Research (2016), Why Successful Executives Fail
 
4. DDI Global Leadership Forecast (2021), Assessing the Risks in Leadership Transitions
 
5. McGill, P., Clarke, P., & Sheffield, D. (2019). From “blind elation” to “oh my goodness, what have I gotten into”: Exploring the experience of executive coaching during leadership transitions into C-suite roles. International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring. Oxford Brookes University.
 
6. Greg Smith, CEO of Teradyne, as quoted in BTS webinar (2025)
 
7. International Coaching Federation (ICF, 2021), The Value of Coaching in Leadership Transitions

In a world where transformation often feels complex and distant, real progress is often sparked at the community level, through leaders who create change from within.

In Senegal, a partnership between BTS Spark and Tostan, a nonprofit dedicated to community-led development across Africa, is bringing this idea to life. It’s a reminder that sustainable leadership isn’t built by imposing new systems. It grows when people are equipped to lead themselves.

A ground-up approach to lasting change

Since 1991, Tostan—whose name means "breakthrough" in Wolof—has partnered with rural African communities to advance human rights, health, literacy, and economic development. Its Community Empowerment Program (CEP) weaves together practical knowledge and human rights education, enabling communities to define and pursue their own visions of progress.

Across eight countries and more than five million lives, Tostan’s approach has led to deep-rooted changes, including the voluntary abandonment of harmful traditional practices. Not by directive, but by choice.

It’s an approach that shows leadership capacity isn’t something to be delivered from outside. It’s something to be nurtured from within.

Meeting communities where they are

In 2024, BTS Spark deepened its collaboration with Tostan through an in-person leadership workshop, led by a BTS Spark consultant, following a year of virtual engagement.

The visit coincided with a leadership transition at the executive level—a pivotal moment requiring clarity, continuity, and resilience. Through targeted coaching and workshops, BTS Spark worked alongside Tostan’s leaders to support the transition and strengthen leadership capacity at every level of the organization.

The focus wasn’t on delivering a model. It was on listening, amplifying existing strengths, and equipping leaders to navigate complexity with confidence.

Practical tools for complex challenges

As part of the ongoing collaboration, BTS Spark also provided custom-designed micro-simulations focused on sectors vital to community sustainability: climate resilience, microfinance, and agriculture.

These micro-sims offer leaders a chance to engage with real-world decision-making challenges in a safe, practical environment—an approach that mirrors how leadership development increasingly happens: not through theory alone, but through repeated, real-world application.

It’s a reminder that growth is rarely linear. It’s built through practice, reflection, and adaptation over time.

Building leadership that endures

The work between BTS Spark and Tostan reflects a broader truth:

Leadership isn’t confined to titles, industries, or regions. It emerges where people are given the tools, trust, and space to act.

Sustainable change, whether in communities or organizations, happens when leadership capacity is strengthened closest to where challenges are lived every day.

The partnership also highlights the power of investing in local capability: focusing on what’s already working, building resilience from within, and preparing leaders not just to meet today’s challenges, but to shape tomorrow’s opportunities.

Moving forward: Scaling with purpose

The work in Senegal is continuing to evolve. BTS Spark and Tostan are exploring ways to extend leadership development to more communities, deepen their impact, and continue supporting transformation through shared expertise and partnership.

It’s a model rooted in respect, collaboration, and the belief that leadership is most powerful when it reflects the realities and aspirations of the people closest to the work.

A talent leader’s guide to critical role planning

To thrive amid massive changes from economic upheavals to AI transformation, today’s organizations must be able to adapt, recover, and grow stronger in the face of adversity – they must build resilience.

What truly makes an organization resilient? It’s not just strategic plans or operational efficiency; fundamentally, it’s about people. Resilient organizations are those that recognize the critical roles within their teams, nurture talent, and create a culture where adaptability and innovation are the norms.

At the recent Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) Annual Conference in Chicago, BTSers Lynn Collins, Maia Whelan, and their esteemed panelists led a compelling discussion: Critical role strategy for organizational resilience. The session focused on how identifying and nurturing critical roles can help organizations build resilience in today’s rapidly evolving business landscape. This blog explores actionable strategies from the panel discussion for talent leaders looking to redefine critical role planning and build organizational resilience.

What is a critical role?

A critical role isn’t confined to the executive level. Effective leadership and organizational success depend significantly on roles scattered throughout your organization.

Middle managers, for example, serve as essential bridges between strategy and operational execution: they ensure that the organization’s broader objectives are translated into actionable tasks that teams can understand and implement. Project leads are also at the helm of initiatives that can redefine the business landscape for a company. They deploy new technologies, spearhead market expansions, manage diverse teams, and maintain project coherence to drive transformation.

The challenge with critical role planning, therefore, lies in the fluid nature of what constitutes a ‘critical role’. Agility in reevaluating and recalibrating these roles allows organizations to respond dynamically to new challenges and opportunities. In the pharmaceutical industry, as companies increasingly shift their focus towards biologics, the roles responsible for managing these technologies become increasingly important. Similarly, in the financial sector, roles that steer digital transformations are pivotal.

Identifying and fortifying these critical roles is paramount. This involves not only recognizing the key positions, but nurturing the talent within through a thoughtfully crafted, future-focused talent development strategy.

Nurturing talent is the key for organizational resilience

Investing in talent goes beyond filling positions; it’s about preparing your organization to face future challenges while bolstering current capabilities. This investment significantly impacts turnover, retention, and promotion rates, contributing positively to both the individuals involved and the organizational culture at large.

At BTS, we see common themes with our clients across industries:  

• Talent strategy is essential for safeguarding organizational resilience. This includes adopting a digital mindset, not just externally by hiring new talents, but also internally upskilling existing employees to meet new challenges.  

• Enhancing emotional intelligence is equally vital in enabling the workforce to manage stress and adapt to changes effectively.

• Strengthening business acumen across all levels of the organization is also crucial for fostering resilience. Employees are better equipped to make informed decisions that align with strategic goals when they develop a keen understanding of business operations and market dynamics.  

This comprehensive approach—combining technological proficiency, emotional intelligence, and business insight—ensures that teams are not only competent but also agile and strategic in the face of ongoing challenges.

6 ways talent leaders should think differently about critical roles  

Here’s what you can do to think outside the box to enhance both individual and organizational performance through critical role strategy:

1. Broaden the definition of critical roles: Talent leaders should evaluate roles based on their actual impact on the organization, rather than focusing on organizational hierarchy.
2. Foster role flexibility: Encourage a culture of adaptability by regularly reassessing and recalibrating critical roles. This ensures roles can be defined to align with evolving strategic needs and current business priorities, keeping the organization agile and responsive to change.
3. Use data-driven role analysis: Use data to track the effectiveness of critical roles in real-time and adjust role criteria based on evidential data rather than intuition.  
4. Create a proactive talent acquisition strategy: Talent leaders should engage in continuous talent scouting, not just when a role becomes vacant. This involves understanding the talent landscape and building relationships with potential candidates before the need arises.  
5. Decentralize talent decisions: Empower local managers and teams to make critical talent decisions to ensure that those who are closest to the work have a say in who fills pivotal roles. This approach can lead to more informed and effective placement decisions. To maintain rigor and ensure consistency, establish clear guidelines and accountability frameworks. This helps maintain high standards across all decisions and strategically aligns talent management with broader organizational goals.
6. Enhance diversity in critical roles: Actively work to increase diversity within critical roles. This involves not only recruiting a diverse workforce, but also creating pathways for diverse talent to advance into these roles. Diverse perspectives can lead to more innovative solutions and resilience against market disruptions. Comprehensive mentorship initiatives, equitable advancement opportunities, and ongoing diversity trainings ensure that all talented individuals have the chance to significantly contribute to the organization.

These strategies are designed to help talent leaders transform their organizations into agile entities capable of anticipating and responding to rapid changes. This fosters a culture that not only values but thrives on adaptability, proactive talent development, and strategic foresight.  

Invest in your people

As a talent leader, your influence is pivotal in steering your organization towards greater resilience. By redefining and enriching critical roles and the talent that fills them, you’re not just preparing your organization to face future challenges but to excel amidst them.  

This requires a commitment to pushing the boundaries of traditional talent management by:

• Taking innovative approaches to career development

• Using predictive analytics to better understand and deploy talent in critical roles

• Embedding continuous growth and feedback into your culture

Such efforts ensure that critical roles are not only filled with competent individuals but are also continuously evolving to meet the demands of a dynamic business environment. By doing so, you transform resilience into a powerful competitive advantage, ensuring your organization remains agile, forward-thinking, and robust.

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Candidates now arrive at interviews pre-coached by AI, with their resumes optimized to pass every checkpoint. Polish has stopped being a signal. The traditional hiring process was built to read exactly the cues that AI is now best at producing, and the signals hiring managers once relied on have weakened as a result. And for roles where the wrong hire carries real business consequences, losing the ability to tell who will actually perform is not a minor inconvenience. It is a material risk, and it exposes the business to unnecessary turnover, reduced performance, and heavier investment for talent growth and development.

So how do you observe the behaviors that matter most, before someone is in the role?

Not by asking better questions, but rather by putting candidates in situations designed to elicit that behavior.

The limits of predicting from paper

Credentials tell you what someone has done. Structured interviews tell you what someone says they would do. Neither lets you observe what they actually do in the moments that count.

This distinction matters most in client-facing, relationship-driven roles, where the performance gap between a strong hire and a weak one plays out in real business outcomes (revenue, retention, client growth). Organizations that hire at scale in these roles carry that gap across hundreds of decisions at a time.

The better approach is to watch candidates do the work before you hire them. Put them in simulated, role-relevant scenarios, and pair the simulation with a second, different kind of measure so no single method carries the whole decision. That combination is what lets you evaluate real performance before anyone is in the role. Organization-specific simulations provide a clear read on who is ready and capable of performing on day one. In a world of AI-supported candidate signals, the use of simulations makes the process harder to prep for. It is harder to fake. And, when designed well, it is substantially more predictive than other hiring methods.  

What counts as evidence

Claims about predictive power are easy to make. Evidence for them is rarer than you would expect.

A predictive validity study, the kind that links pre-hire assessment scores to how someone actually performs once hired, is some of the hardest evidence to produce and the rarest to see. Many assessments are validated against proxies: another test, or a theoretical model of the role, rather than real results on the job. Connecting scores to concrete business outcomes and doing the statistical work to show the link holds, takes years of shared data and a level of commitment from both the assessment provider and the client that most partnerships never reach. That is precisely why it is worth asking for. A provider who can show how assessment scores track to training completion, retention, and first-year output is offering something categorically different from one who can only show a correlation with another test.

Why simulation holds up where other methods do not

When a candidate sits across from a trained assessor (someone playing the client or prospect on the other side of the conversation) and has to work through a real situation, they cannot rely on a rehearsed answer. The scenario is specific. The stakes feel real. What you see is close to what you would get on the job.

That is the value of simulation-based assessment: it does not test what candidates know about the role.

It shows how they use what they know when a real person is on the other side of the conversation, before the stakes are real.

For roles that carry significant business responsibility, this distinction is the whole game. The cost of the wrong hire in a high-stakes client-facing role is not just a missed quota for a quarter - It plays out in relationships that do not develop, clients who leave, and productivity losses that compound over time. Getting those hiring decisions right, at scale, with consistency, requires methods that are built for predictive accuracy, not just candidate experience or hiring speed.

What this means for how organizations think about hiring

Most organizations are still optimizing the wrong things in their hiring process. They invest heavily in employer branding, application flow, and interview structure, all of which matter, but less in the core question: does our hiring process actually predict who will succeed in this role?

AI has sharpened the stakes here. If every candidate can present as polished and prepared, screening based on presentation becomes less useful. What holds up is direct observation of the behaviors that the job requires.

A few principles worth building from:

• Measure what the job requires, not what is easy to measure. Cognitive tests and personality questionnaires have their place, but they do not look much like the job. The closer the assessment is to the actual work, the better it predicts performance in it.

• Ask what your assessment predicts. Training completion? Retention? First-year output? Most organizations cannot answer that question today, largely because providers have rarely been asked to prove it. It is a fair thing to ask for.

• Take the human element seriously. In a simulation, a candidate is having a real conversation, responding in real time, navigating a situation that requires judgment. Even with the help of AI, that is hard to game. And it remains one of the strongest predictors of on-the-job performance available.

The data exists to make hiring decisions more accurate, fairer, and more directly tied to business outcomes. For organizations operating in high-stakes roles at scale, there is too much on the line to rely on methods that cannot hold up to that standard.

You may be interested in BTS’ thought leadership in the five talent shifts AI is forcing now.  

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La IA ya forma parte del día a día de las ventas. Hoy cualquier asesor puede llegar a una reunión con datos, tendencias e insights generados en segundos. Sin embargo, disponer de más información no garantiza conversaciones de mayor valor.

A través de una experiencia real con un consultor comercial, este artículo explica por qué la inteligencia artificial funciona como un GPS: ayuda a interpretar el entorno, pero no conduce la conversación ni entiende las prioridades del cliente.

En este artículo descubrirás:

• Por qué el acceso a la información ya no supone una ventaja competitiva.
• La importancia del business acumen para interpretar los datos con criterio.
• Cómo hablar el lenguaje del cliente genera credibilidad y diferenciación.
• Por qué las relaciones B2B evolucionan hacia relaciones P2P basadas en la confianza.
• Qué capacidades consultivas seguirán siendo exclusivamente humanas incluso en la era de la IA.

La tecnología seguirá evolucionando, pero la ventaja competitiva estará en quienes sean capaces de combinar inteligencia artificial con conversaciones centradas en el cliente, pensamiento estratégico y relaciones de largo plazo.

Leadership is the work of creating shared understanding, and language is the primary tool for doing it. Yet we spend remarkably little time examining our words. Every decision, expectation, priority, and piece of feedback reaches another person through words. If those words aren't doing the job, neither is the leadership.

The lighthouse

Some years ago, a large company hired a strategy consulting firm to rethink its leadership model. The firm came back with a beautifully produced framework built around a central metaphor: the lighthouse.

Leaders, the model declared, should be lighthouses.

The metaphor quickly found its way into playbooks, performance reviews, onboarding decks, and town halls. People repeated it with the confidence of those who had paid a lot of money for it.

There was just one problem: nobody could agree on what a lighthouse was supposed to do.

Was it warning people away from danger? Guiding them toward a destination? Standing firm while everything else changed?

Eventually, the company hired another team to translate the metaphor into specific, observable leadership behaviors.

It was an expensive way to discover that a word everyone confidently repeated wasn't creating nearly as much shared understanding asthey thought.

Why jargon prevails

• Parking lot that
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Business jargon survives because it’s largely designed to manage social risk. Using it signals, I know how this world works. It demonstrates membership, competence, and credibility.

Business is messy, and leaders don't always have complete information. Abstract language lets us project confidence while preserving flexibility.

Altitude without traction

Specific language creates accountability. The more specific you are, the easier it is for people to disagree, question your thinking, orhold you accountable. That's part of the appeal of jargon. It creates distance between the speaker and the detail. The more abstract and elevated your language, the more strategic you sound.

A 2020 study by Harvard Business School professors Laura Huang and Andy Wu, published in the Academy ofManagement Journal, analyzed over 1,000 early-stage startup pitches and found that founders who spoke in abstract, visionary terms were significantly more likely to advance in the funding process.

A separate study, published in Applied Cognitive Psychology in 2025, found the other side: jargon raises how credible a speaker appears and lowers how much the audience retains.

The very language that helps people see you as a leader can make you less effective once you're leading.

The most trusted leaders tend to be the ones who resist impressive-sounding language and say the plainest version of what they mean.

In fact, four words probably do more for a leader's standing than any carefully crafted message: I made a mistake. Not "we encountered some headwinds," not "there were learnings from this experience," but the plain version.

The cost of comfort

When a conversation gets uncomfortable at work, it almost always feels easier to soften your message than to say exactly what you mean. You hedge, add qualifiers, cushion the point with extra reassurance, or leave the hardest part unsaid. Most of the time, you mean well. You don't want to discourage someone, damage the relationship, or create unnecessary conflict. The conversation becomes less uncomfortable for a moment, but the work often becomes harder afterward.

Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School and author of The Fearless Organization, found that the fear of making a negative impression pushes people to stay silent exactly when clarity is most needed. According to her research, silence is one of the most consistent predictors of teams that miss problems early and never learn from them. The friction avoided in the meeting resurfaces later, at greater cost.

KimScott, former executive at Google and Apple and author of Radical Candor, calls this ruinous empathy: softening your message to protect someone's short-term feelings comes at the cost of the clarity they need. Her argument is simple and uncomfortable: clear, direct communication, even when it is hard, is an act of care.

The quiet power of saying what you mean

None of this is an argument for bland, colorless language.Vivid, precise writing does the opposite of jargon: it sharpens meaning instead of hiding it. Before reaching for a word, pause on two questions:

• What do I mean by it? 
• What will my audience hear? 

A surprising amount of corporate language wouldn't survive those two questions.

Leaders have more influence over language than they often realize. Whatever tone, vocabulary, and level of directness they model becomes the standard everyone else copies. Word choice is one of the quietest ways leaders shape culture.

This matters even more as we hand our language to AI. These tools can already learn to write in our voice. The question now is whether we've been deliberate enough about that voice in the first place to like what we see.