About half of senior executives will fail in their roles. That’s not a guess — it’s what HBR’s 2026 research on leadership effectiveness found. The number has barely moved in years, despite companies spending more than ever on leadership development and executive coaching. So what’s going wrong?
The hiring process is broken in a specific way
Here’s the pattern. A company promotes or hires a senior leader based on their track record — they hit their numbers, they know the industry, they interview well. Twelve months later, things are falling apart.
The skills that made someone successful as an individual contributor are genuinely different from the skills that make someone successful as a senior executive. Individual contributors get rewarded for their own output. Executives succeed or fail based on how well they make decisions under pressure, build trust across teams they don’t directly control, and keep honest information flowing up to them. Most hiring processes don’t test for any of that.
DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2025 surveyed over 10,000 leaders across 26 countries and found that only 23% of organizations feel confident in their ability to assess leaders for senior roles. But those same organizations said they feel good about their interview processes. The process feels thorough. It’s measuring the wrong things.
What actually causes senior leaders to fail
The research points to a few consistent failure modes — and none of them show up clearly in a job interview.
They can’t hear bad news. Hogan Assessments has spent decades studying why executives derail. One of the most common patterns: leaders who come across as bold and decisive under normal conditions become defensive and closed off when things get hard. They stop updating their view of what’s happening. They surround themselves with agreement. And by the time the real picture surfaces, it’s too late.
They kill honest communication without knowing it. HBR’s March 2026 research found that when senior leaders lack strong people skills, organizational change efforts collapse — not because the strategy was wrong, but because information stops flowing accurately. If your team senses you react badly to bad news, they’ll stop bringing it. You’ll think everything is fine. It won’t be.
They focus inward when they should be looking outward. Executives who plateau tend to be excellent internal managers — great at running meetings, resolving disputes, keeping their team organized. What they miss is the external picture: what competitors are doing, what customers actually want, where the market is shifting. The leaders who last long-term stay obsessively curious about what’s happening outside their organization.
What you can do differently
These failure modes are detectable before someone starts the job. You just have to look for them deliberately.
- Change how you do reference calls. Most reference calls are useless because people ask useless questions. Instead, ask: how did this person respond when a major initiative they led failed? What conditions brought out their worst? What’s the one thing you’d want them to work on? These questions get to the behaviors that polished interviews hide. Most hiring managers never make this call. The ones who do learn things that change their decision.
- Test how they handle being wrong. In your conversations with candidates, challenge something they’ve said — not aggressively, just with a reasonable counter-argument. Watch what happens. Do they engage with it genuinely? Or do they dig in? Leaders who can update their view when the evidence shifts consistently outperform those who can’t. It’s one of the clearest signals you can observe directly.
- Don’t treat personality assessments as a one-time filter. Many organizations run assessment tools during hiring, file the results, and never look at them again. The organizations that get real value from this data use it as the starting point for ongoing coaching conversations — especially in the first year of a new role, when the pressure is highest and the failure risk is greatest.
- Build in outside feedback from day one. DDI’s data shows that the senior leaders who perform best over time consistently maintain contact with people outside their direct chain — customers, peers at other companies, coaches, board members. They get honest input that their own team can’t always give them. If you’re hiring or developing a senior leader, make this structural, not optional. The warning signs of a weak leadership pipeline often trace back to executives who stopped seeking outside perspective years before anything went visibly wrong.
The bigger picture
DDI found that 77% of HR leaders lack confidence in whether they have the right people ready for critical senior roles. Trust in managers has dropped 37% since 2022. Forty percent of leaders say they’re thinking about leaving.
Getting the wrong person into a senior role is expensive — the direct cost of the failed hire, the damage to team morale and retention, and a leadership bench that was already thin before the vacancy opened. The cognitive biases that distort hiring decisions hit hardest at the top, where the emotional investment in making a choice is highest and the time to evaluate carefully is shortest.
The tools to make better decisions already exist. The research on what actually predicts success is solid. What’s missing is the willingness to use that information honestly — especially when a candidate interviews brilliantly and everyone in the room wants to say yes.