ISSUE #021 | THE LEADERSHIP CONTRARIAN
A few weeks ago I was at my favorite Starbucks - the one between my house and the office, managed by a friend of mine I've known for the better part of twenty years. She introduced me to a new team member who had just transferred in. Already trained. Already experienced. She had worked at four or five other Starbucks locations and knew every part of the job.
I ran into that same barista again this week and asked how it was going.
"It's different here, and it’s hard," she told me. "Everything is different. The way the team handles stress. The rhythm of the store. The busy times and when the rushes are."
She wasn't complaining. She was just being honest.
"I know how to make the coffee. I know the system. But every store has its own culture, its own personality, its own way of doing things."
I let that sit for a minute.
This is one of the most recognized brands in the world. The training is standardized. The menu is the same. The equipment is the same. And yet a fully skilled, fully experienced employee still needed real time to integrate into a new location.
So here's the question I want you to sit with: If that's true at Starbucks, why would your organization be any different?
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Leaders hire for a reason. Usually several reasons at once. You're overloaded and need relief. You're behind and need capacity. You see an opportunity and need to move. Whatever the specific pressure, the underlying message in the phrase "I need someone who can hit the ground running" is almost always the same: I need someone to carry real weight quickly, because we're already stretched thin.
That's not a bad instinct. It's actually a legitimate and understandable one.
But "hit the ground running" has become one of those phrases leaders use to describe a real need while accidentally building a process that undermines the very outcome they're after.
It sounds like a high standard. It's actually a low-quality shortcut dressed up as a high expectation.
That's the contrarian argument I want to make today. And I think if you'll stay with me through three sections, you'll come out the other side seeing your next leadership hire - and maybe the one you already made - in a very different light.
When leaders say they want someone who can hit the ground running, the desire underneath that phrase is real and legitimate. They want a capable person who can carry meaningful responsibility without constant hand-holding. They want to stop being the bottleneck. They want relief.
But underneath that desire is an assumption that rarely gets examined: that a highly capable person needs minimal onboarding to succeed; and that experience transfers cleanly from their previous organization to yours.
The research on this is some of the most sobering data I've come across in years of studying leadership and organizational health.
A nine-year study out of Princeton tracked more than 1,000 top-performing analysts at 78 different firms. These were genuine stars, consistently high performers with track records to prove it. What happened when they moved to a new firm? The probability of remaining a top performer dropped by nearly 50%. And that decline persisted for at least five years. (Boris Groysberg, Chasing Stars, Princeton University Press — 9-year longitudinal study, 1,000+ analysts, 78 firms)
Not because they lost their skills. Not because they became less intelligent or less motivated. But because high performance is co-produced between the individual and a specific organizational system - the colleagues, the processes, the culture, the decision-making norms, the relationships. When you hire someone away from another organization, you import the person. You do not import the system that made them effective.
That finding is consistent with what multiple independent sources show about senior leader failure rates: roughly 40-47% of leaders fail or significantly disappoint within 18 months of being hired. External hires fail at about 1.4 times the rate of internal promotions. (DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2021; Heidrick & Struggles analysis of 20,000 executive placements — converging estimates from independent sources)
Here's the practical implication: the more different your organization is from the one this person came from - different in structure, culture, size, product, leadership style - the harder the integration and the higher the risk. Context is not a nice-to-have. Context is the environment in which competence either flourishes or fails.
Competence is critical. Absolutely. But if competence is the foundation, context is the multiplier. And most leaders are hiring for the former while neglecting to build the latter.
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When you hire someone, especially into a leadership role, there are actually two distinct things you're hiring for. The first is job competency: can they do the work? The second is culture fit: can they operate effectively in your environment? You can screen for both in the interview process, but only intentional onboarding builds the second. Culture fit doesn't arrive on day one, no matter who you hire or how much experience they bring.
I've watched this play out so many times across so many organizations that it almost has a script.
A leader identifies a real need - a department that isn't functioning, a gap in capacity, a role that would unlock the next level of growth. They go through an interview process, often with multiple people involved, and they land on someone who looks strong on paper. There's genuine organizational hope around the hire. And then, almost immediately, the wheels start coming off in ways nobody anticipated.
The expectations for the role were never clearly defined in writing. The specific skills required for this leadership position in this organization were never fully articulated. The new leader operates from a set of assumptions about how authority works that don't match the culture they've walked into, leaning on positional power where the organization runs on relational trust, or vice versa.
And the senior leader who should be driving the onboarding? They're pulled toward the next urgent thing, which is almost always the reason they made the hire in the first place.
Nobody owns the integration. And a leader who could have succeeded, who had real capability, never fully connects to the culture. The department stays stuck. The organization absorbs the cost quietly, often for much longer than it should.
I've seen this in manufacturing companies and nonprofits, in professional services firms and family businesses. The details change. The script doesn't.
The research confirms exactly why this pattern is so common and so costly. When senior leaders fail, the cause is almost never technical incompetence. According to research involving more than 500 senior executives, 68% of leadership failures come down to politics, culture, and people - not capability. 65% of failed leaders cite cultural misfit as a primary factor. 69% point to a poor grasp of how the organization actually works - the unwritten rules, who really makes decisions, how things actually get done. (McKinsey 2018 executive transition research; Egon Zehnder 12th International Executive Panel, 500+ senior executives)
The failure isn't fully the person. It's the gap between the person and a system that was never intentionally built to integrate them.
Onboarding is the process. But the goal is something deeper than a completed checklist. The goal is a leader who is deeply integrated and genuinely rooted in your culture, in your team's trust, in the unwritten rules of how your organization actually works.
There's a phrase I heard recently that I can't stop thinking about: slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Going fast out of the gate feels like urgency. It feels like action. But when it comes to leadership integration, speed in the short term almost always creates the exact chaos leaders were trying to escape.
The leaders who invest in a slower, more intentional start - who define success clearly, build genuine understanding of the culture, and establish trust before cranking up accountability - are the ones who get to speed faster in the long run.
Onboarding isn't HR bureaucracy. It isn't hand-holding. It's organizational architecture. And when you skip it, you're not saving time. You're borrowing against a debt that will come due at the worst possible moment.
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Before I make the final argument, I want to give you an analogy that I think puts the stakes in the clearest possible terms.
A heart transplant is one of the most complex procedures in modern medicine. Nobody wheels a donor heart into the operating room and says, "Let's just get this in there and get going, this person wants to get on with their life."
There is an extensive evaluation process before a single incision is made. Is the recipient healthy enough to receive the heart? What is their body size and frame? Does the recipient have a strong support system to help them with the recovery? What is the condition of the donor heart? Does the match make sense?
A friend of mine went through this last year - a big man, tall and broad-shouldered, a water polo player in college - and the medical team specifically needed a heart large enough for his frame. The match had to be right before anything else could happen.
Then comes the surgery itself: meticulous, precise, nothing rushed. Then the immediate post-operative period - close monitoring, anti-rejection medications, watching carefully for what the medical team can influence but cannot fully control.
Then a graduated process of stepping back: from daily hospital visits, to weekly, to monthly. From supervised rehabilitation to independent exercise. From restricted activity to building real strength. Six months to a year before a transplant recipient is truly operating independently. And after all of that? Often years of vitality that weren't available before, because the process was done right.
A leadership hire is a transplant. The match matters enormously - the more different the environment they're coming from, the more careful you need to be. The onboarding is the surgery and the recovery: detailed, attentive, and not something you rush because you're impatient to see results. And if the integration fails, if the leader is effectively "rejected" by the organizational body, the damage doesn't stay contained to that one person or that one role.
A leader who never gets rooted creates friction throughout your organization - in morale, in communication, in trust, in how your team executes day to day. And the research on what that actually costs is significant. Failed leadership transitions correlate with 20% engagement loss across the affected team and 15% performance drops in the business unit. Teams led by leaders who transition successfully, by contrast, are 90% more likely to meet their three-year goals, with meaningfully lower turnover risk. (McKinsey executive transition research)
I learned this the hard way myself. Years ago, when HaBO was growing rapidly - 400% in a matter of years - we desperately needed help. We hired someone for what amounted to a COO-light role in our ten-person company. She came from an organization of 2,000 people, with large budgets, multiple support staff, and systems built to support her way of working. She claimed the experience. On paper, it looked like it could work.
What I didn't fully understand at the time was that her high performance at the previous company was deeply tied to that company's specific environment. She knew how to operate within those people, those systems, that culture.
None of that translated into our world. Three years - and significant financial and emotional cost to Kathryn, to me, to our staff - passed before we finally made the decision we probably should have made two and a half years earlier. I gave too much benefit of the doubt for too long. And the price of that was real.
The evidence-based expectation for a senior leader to reach full impact, by the way, is six to twelve months minimum - not ninety days. Less than 30% of executives receive any structured integration support at all. That gap between what the research says is needed and what most organizations actually provide is where the failure lives. (Egon Zehnder 12th International Executive Panel; Watkins/Gabarro leadership transition research)
The leaders who build enduring organizations don't just hire talent. They build environments where talent can become effective. That means defining success clearly and building realistic systems and expectations to get people genuinely up to speed.
It means transferring the organizational nuance that nobody writes down - the unwritten rules, the real decision-making process, the relational dynamics that determine whether someone succeeds or fails.
It means coaching them early, being clear about who owns what, and earning the right to hold them accountable before you actually do.
Not because you're lowering standards. Because you're sophisticated enough to know that talent alone doesn't build organizations. Intentional integration does.
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I ran into that barista again this morning. She's figuring it out. A few weeks in, still finding her footing with the team, still learning the rhythm of this particular store. But she's getting there, not because someone gave her a manual, but because the people around her are paying attention.
The question was never whether she was capable. She clearly is. The question was whether the context would support her.
That's the question I want you to carry into your next hire.
You have poured yourself into building this organization. Whatever the pressure you're under right now - whether you need relief, or you need growth, or you need to repair something that's broken - this is one of the most important investments you can make.
You may not have done it well before. Most leaders haven't. It's not something that gets talked about enough, taught enough, or taken seriously enough in the world of small and mid-sized business.
And if you don't feel equipped to build this well on your own, get some help. That's not a weakness. That's wisdom. Because the leaders who build organizations that last aren't just good judges of talent.
They're builders of environments where talent can thrive.
If this was helpful to you, email me and let me know.
Until next time,
Keep learning.
Keep growing.
And God bless,
Michael