Transition
Not every failed transition looks like a crisis. Most look like nothing much at all, a capable leader in a good role slowly failing to take hold, until the organisation has quietly moved on without them.
The transitions that make the news are the loud ones, the abrupt exit or the succession that detonates in public. They are also the rare ones. The ordinary failure is quiet, and the quiet is exactly what makes it dangerous. A capable person, in a role that looked right on paper, slowly fails to take hold. Nothing snaps. The organisation just drifts on past them, and by the time anyone puts a name to it, the moment to fix it has gone.
This is the failure buried inside the numbers, and there are more of them about than usual. Executive turnover is running at record highs, with a record number of public-company chief executives leaving in 2025 by the count of Challenger, Gray and Christmas, and the leaders who remain are strained. DDI's Global Leadership Forecast 2025 found that 40 percent of leaders under heightened stress have thought about walking away from leadership altogether, rarely with any announcement. When McKinsey's long-cited work, still carried by the Harvard Business Review, puts transition failure between 27 and 46 percent within two years, most of those are not blow-ups either. They are quiet.
It almost never has a single cause. It gathers. A relationship with the board that never quite set, a leadership team that went along without ever really signing up, a run of small decisions that each looked reasonable on the day but together told everyone the new leader had not read the room. None of these is a crisis on its own, and every one of them is survivable. The damage is in the way they pile up without comment, because no single event is ever big enough to force the conversation that would bring them into the open.
By the time the signs are impossible to argue with, the story has mostly been written.
A visible crisis at least declares itself, and in declaring itself it summons help. A quiet failure does the reverse. Because nothing is obviously wrong, nobody steps in, and the leader is often the last person to learn the verdict was reached weeks ago. The calm that hides it is the same calm that makes it so hard to turn around. By the time the signs are impossible to argue with, a missed number, a resignation, a board that has gone cool in its emails, the story has mostly been written. Transitions get decided early. The quiet ones get decided earliest of all, in the first few weeks, long before there is anything you could point to.
The guard against a quiet failure is not watchfulness once the job starts. It is the work done before it. A leader who has already been honest with themselves about where their authority will come from, which relationships will carry the opening stretch, and how they tend to behave when the pressure is on, is much harder to lose quietly, for the plain reason that they are already watching the places quiet failures form. That is the argument for doing the work before the spotlight rather than under it. The loud failures are rare and mostly out of anyone's hands. The quiet ones are common, and they nearly always trace back to preparation that never got done.
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