What executive readiness means.

Readiness is an easy word until the moment you have to put a mark against a name. Boards reach for it to mean a candidate looks the part. The candidate hears it as a description of how they feel on a decent day. Both are guesses made from the outside, and readiness is not something you can see from there.

Clearing away the stand-ins

Experience is the first one to go. It is a list of rooms already survived, and it forecasts the next room only when the next room looks like the last, which at the top it rarely does. Confidence is worse than useless as a signal, because it tends to run highest precisely where self-knowledge runs lowest. And doing the current job well proves less than people assume. The oldest transition failure in the book is the person who was outstanding one level down and took it for granted that the same strengths would carry them up. Every one of these holds right up until the moment you actually need it, and then gives way.

A definition worth using

Here is the one this practice works from. Readiness is the fit between a particular leader and the particular demands of the role they are about to take, judged honestly in advance rather than found out on the job. The word doing the work is particular. Someone can be entirely ready for one chair and not for the one beside it, and the difference usually has nothing to do with talent. It has to do with whether they have already met, in some form, the specific pressures the new chair will bring down on them.

Someone can be ready for one chair and not for the one beside it.

How you actually measure it

Because it is specific, you assess it against the real role, not against a template of the ideal executive. In practice that means looking hard at a handful of things. You watch how someone holds up when the load actually comes on, and whether their judgement still works on partial information against a running clock. You look at whether they can hear what a board or an investor or a successor is really asking, including the part nobody says out loud. It matters where they believe their own authority comes from, and what they reach for the moment it is tested. And it matters whether they can give an honest account of themselves under pressure, especially the strength that curdles when it gets pushed too far. Looked at this way, readiness stops being a mood and turns into something you can point at. It shows you where the widest gap sits, and that gap is usually where the whole thing gets decided.

Why the timing is the point

Doing this before the role rather than during it comes down to plain economics. The role is the most expensive classroom there is, and the supply of people ready to walk into it is thinner than the headcount suggests. DDI's Global Leadership Forecast 2025, drawn from nearly eleven thousand leaders, found the share of high-potential talent planning to leave within the year had climbed from 13 percent in 2020 to 21 percent in 2024, quietly draining the bench that is meant to produce ready leaders. The cost of getting it wrong, meanwhile, has not moved. McKinsey's figure, still carried by the Harvard Business Review, puts executive transition failure between 27 and 46 percent inside two years, and those were not people short on ability. They were people whose particular weak spots went unnamed until the job found them.

Readiness, done properly, is just the work of finding those weak spots while they are still cheap to close. It happens off-stage and it wins no applause. It is also most of what separates a leader who takes hold from one the organisation slowly stops believing in.