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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Global spending on AI is forecast to reach $2.52 trillion by 2026, a 44% year-over-year increase, according to Gartner. At the same time, only about 10% of AI pilots scale beyond proof of concept.

What’s the disconnect?

Why aren’t most organizations seeing the ROI they hoped for, despite making such large investments?

It’s not because the technology isn’t ready. And it’s not because the use cases are unclear.

The disconnect exists because many organizations are investing in AI as a technology upgrade and expecting a business transformation in return.

The tools are advancing at breathtaking speed, and most organizations already have AI in motion. But the work itself often stays the same. AI gets layered onto existing tasks instead of being used to rethink workflows end to end. Adoption metrics go up, while decisions, operating models, and value creation remain largely untouched.

When teams first start using AI, they do what makes sense. They try to recreate today, just faster. Can it help me write this? Analyze that? Save a bit of time?

That’s a smart place to begin. But it’s not where ROI, or reinvention, actually shows up.

Getting over the hump

Real returns begin when teams experience what we often call “getting over the hump.”

This is the moment when two things click at once:  

1. AI can fundamentally change how work gets done.

2. People don’t need deep technical expertise to make that change happen.

When teams see weeks of work compress into hours, or watch an end-to-end workflow suddenly run in a new way, something shifts. Confidence replaces hesitation. Curiosity replaces caution. The questions change, from “How do I use this tool?” to “What’s possible now?”

That shift matters, because ROI doesn’t come from using AI more often, it comes from using it to work differently.

Why ROI stalls as AI scales

As AI initiatives expand, many organizations discover that the limiting factor isn’t the technology itself. It’s the environment surrounding the work.

ROI shows up when teams are able to explore and redesign workflows, not just automate steps. That requires clarity on outcomes and guardrails, but also room to experiment, learn, and iterate. When AI is tightly controlled or narrowly deployed, pilots stay pilots. When people are trusted to rethink how work happens, value starts to compound.

Organizations that unlock ROI don’t chase perfect use cases upfront. They focus on learning faster and applying those insights where they matter most.

The early signal that ROI is coming

Long before AI shows up in financial results, there’s an earlier indicator that organizations are on the right path.

People are energized by the work.

You see it when teams start sharing experiments, when ideas move across functions, and when learning becomes visible rather than hidden. Progress feels owned, not imposed.

That energy isn’t accidental. It’s a signal that people feel trusted to rethink how work happens, and that trust is essential to turning investment into impact.

Reinvention happens closer to the work than most expect

AI reinvention rarely starts with a sweeping rollout or a multi-year roadmap. More often, it begins with one meaningful workflow, one team close to the work, and a willingness to ask a different question.

With the right support, that team gets over the hump. What they learn becomes reusable. Patterns emerge. Over time, those insights connect, creating enterprise-wide impact and sustained ROI.

That’s how organizations move from isolated pilots to real returns.

What this means for AI investment

No organization feels fully “caught up” with AI, and that’s true across industries.

The organizations that will realize ROI aren’t waiting for certainty or the next breakthrough tool. They’re reinvesting their AI spend into new ways of working that scale human potential alongside technology.

Handled thoughtfully, AI doesn’t distance people from the work. It brings them closer - to better decisions, stronger collaboration, and better outcomes.

For many organizations, that’s where the real return begins.

Technology choices are often made under pressure - pressure to modernize, to respond to shifting client expectations, to demonstrate progress, or to keep pace with rapid advances in AI. In those moments, even experienced leadership teams can fall into familiar traps: over-estimating how differentiated a capability will remain, under-estimating the organizational cost of sustaining it, and committing earlier than the strategy or operating model can realistically support.

After decades of working with leaders through digital and technology-enabled transformations, I’ve seen these dynamics play out again and again. The issue is rarely the quality of the technology itself. It’s the timing of commitment, and how quickly an early decision hardens into something far harder to unwind than anyone intended.

What has changed in today’s AI-accelerated environment is not the nature of these traps, but the margin for error. It has narrowed dramatically.

For small and mid-sized organizations, the consequences are immediate. You don't have specialist teams running parallel experiments or long runways to course correct. A single bad platform decision can absorb scarce capital, distort operating models, and take years to unwind just as the market shifts again.

AI intensified this tension. It is wildly over-hyped as a silver bullet and quietly under-estimated as a structural disruptor. Both positions are dangerous. AI won’t magically fix broken processes or weak strategy, but it will change the economics of how work gets done and where value accrues.

When leaders ask how to approach digital platforms, AI adoption, or operating model design, four questions consistently matter more than the technology itself.

• What specific market problem does this solve, and what is it worth?
• Is this capability genuinely unique, or is it rapidly becoming commoditized?
• What is the true total cost - not just to build, but to run and evolve over time?
• What is the current pace of innovation for this niche?

For many leadership teams, answering these questions leads to the same strategic posture. Move quickly today while preserving options for tomorrow. Not as doctrine, but as a way of staying adaptive without mistaking early commitment for strategic clarity.

Why build versus buy is the wrong starting point

One of the most common traps organizations fall into is treating digital strategy as a series of isolated build-vs-buy decisions. That framing is too narrow, and it usually arrives too late.

A more powerful question is this. How do we preserve optionality as the landscape continues to evolve? Technology decisions often become a proxy for deeper organizational challenges. Following acquisitions or periods of rapid change, pressure frequently surfaces at the front line. Sales teams respond to client feedback. Delivery teams push for speed. Leaders look for visible progress.

In these moments, technology becomes the focal point for action. Not because it is the root problem, but because it is tangible.

The real risk emerges operationally. Poorly sequenced transitions, disruption to the core business, and value that proves smaller or shorter-lived than anticipated. Teams become locked into delivery paths that no longer make commercial sense, while underlying system assumptions remain unchanged.

The issue is rarely technical. It is temporal.

Optimizing for short-term optics, particularly client-facing signals of progress, often comes at the expense of longer-term adaptability. A cleaner interface over an ageing platform may buy temporary parity, but it can also delay the more important work of rethinking what is possible in the near and medium term.

Conservatism often shows up quietly here. Not as risk aversion, but as a preference for extending the familiar rather than exploring what could fundamentally change.

Licensing as a way to buy time and insight

In fast-moving areas such as AI orchestration, many organizations are choosing to license capability rather than build it internally. This is not because licensing is perfect. It rarely is. It introduces constraints and trade-offs. But it was fast. And more importantly, it acknowledged reality.

The pace of change in this space is such that what looks like a good architectural decision today may be actively unhelpful in twelve months. Licensing allowed us to operate right at the edge of what we actually understood at the time - without pretending we knew where the market would land six or twelve months later.

Licensing should not be seen as a lack of ambition. It is often a way of buying time, learning cheaply, and avoiding premature commitment. Building too early doesn’t make you visionary, often it just makes you rigid.

AI is neither a silver bullet nor a feature

Coaching is a useful microcosm of the broader AI debate.

Great AI coaching that is designed with intent and grounded in real coaching methodology can genuinely augment the experience and extend impact. The market is saturated with AI-enabled coaching tools and what is especially disappointing is that many are thin layers of prompts wrapped around a large language model. They are responsive, polite, and superficially impressive - and they largely miss the point.

Effective coaching isn’t about constant responsiveness. It’s about clarity. It’s about bringing experience, structure, credibility, and connection to moments where someone is stuck.

At the other extreme, coaches themselves are often deeply traditional. A heavy pen, a leather-bound notebook, and a Royal Copenhagen mug of coffee are far more likely to be sitting on the desk than the latest GPT or Gemini model.

That conservatism is understandable - coaching is built on trust, presence, and human connection - but it’s increasingly misaligned with how scale and impact are actually created.

The real opportunity for AI is not to replace human work with a chat interface. It is to codify what actually works. The decision points, frameworks, insights, and moments that drive behavior change. AI can then be used to augment and extend that value at scale.

A polished interface over generic capability is not enough. If AI does not strengthen the core value of the work, it is theatre, not transformation.

What this means for leaders

Across all of these examples, the same pattern shows up.

The hardest decisions are rarely about capability, they are about timing, alignment, and conviction.

Building from scratch only makes sense when you can clearly articulate:

• What you believe that the market does not
• Why that belief creates defensible value
• Why you’re willing to concentrate risk behind it

Clear vision scales extraordinarily well when it’s tightly held. The success of narrow, focused Silicon Valley start-ups is testament to that.

Larger organizations often carry a broader set of commitments. That complexity increases when depth of expertise is spread across functions, and even more so when sales teams have significant autonomy at the point of sale. Alignment becomes harder not because people are wrong, but because too many partial truths are competing at once.

In these environments, strategic clarity, not headcount or spend, creates advantage.

This is why many leadership teams choose to license early. Not because building is wrong, but because most organizations have not yet earned the right to build.

This article was originally publish on Rotman Management

IN OUR CONSULTING WORK with teams at all levels—especially senior leadership—my colleagues and I have noticed teams grappling with an insidious challenge: a lack of effective prioritization. When everything is labeled a priority, nothing truly is. Employees feel crushed under the weight of competing demands and the relentless urgency to deliver on multiple fronts. Requests for prioritization stem from both a lack of focused direction and the challenge of efficiently fulfilling an overwhelming volume of work. Over time, this creates a toxic cycle of burnout, inefficiency and dissatisfaction.

The instinctive response to this issue is to streamline, reduce the number of initiatives, and focus. While this is a step in the right direction, it doesn’t fully address the problem. Prioritization isn’t just about whittling down a to-do list or ranking activities by importance and urgency on an Eisenhower Decision Matrix; it also requires reshaping how we approach work more productively.

In our work, we have found that three critical factors lie at the heart of solving prioritization challenges: tasks, tracking and trust. Addressing these dimensions holistically can start to address the root causes of feeling overwhelmed and lay the foundation for sustainable productivity. Let’s take a closer look at each.

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