Why the Most Prepared Organizations Don’t Do It Alone

Two-thirds of managers and executives say their recent hires arrived unprepared for their roles. 

That statistic comes from Deloitte’s 2025 Global Human Capital Trends report. And leadership transitions are not slowing down. The Conference Board reports that CEO turnover among top-performing S&P 500 companies jumped from 7% to 12% in 2025, nearly matching the 14% rate among bottom-quartile performers. These are not troubled companies replacing failed leaders. These are successful organizations making deliberate moves to stay ahead. The question is why so many transitions still go wrong. 

The Transition Problem: Why Internal Effort Alone Fails

McKinsey analysis has shown that between 27% and 46% of executive transitions are viewed as failures or disappointments after two years. These are not inexperienced managers taking on stretch assignments. These are senior leaders, vetted by boards, failing at rates that would be unacceptable for any other major capital investment. 

The problem compounds with founder transitions. Harvard Business Review reported in January 2026 that founder-CEO handovers carry a risk of failure or performance downturn two to three times greater than transitions involving non-founder CEOs. The emotional weight and institutional memory involved in these handoffs demand capabilities that most organizations do not have internally. 

Executive search and leadership advisory firms exist precisely because these transitions require access to candidates who are not actively looking, assessment methods that predict performance in specific contexts, and the distance that comes from sitting outside the organization’s history and politics. But the problem starts earlier than the search itself. 

The Succession Problem

Most boards believe their leadership pipelines are healthy. Most boards are wrong. 

The Fortune/Deloitte CEO Survey found that only a third of CEOs strongly agree their company has a viable slate of future candidates. DDI’s HR Insights Report 2025 found similar results: only 20% of HR leaders have successors ready for critical roles, and just 49% of key positions could be filled internally today. The plans may exist. The prepared leaders do not. 

This is where boards err: 

• They confuse having a name on a list with having someone prepared to lead. 
• They allow similarity bias to shape their decisions, favoring candidates who resemble the outgoing executive rather than candidates suited to what the organization will need. 
• They assume that past performance in one role predicts success in a different role. 

Effective succession planning requires: 

• Continuous assessment of internal talent against external benchmarks. 
• Honest evaluation of who is ready and who is not. 
• Development programs that prepare candidates years before they will be needed. 

Organizations that attempt this alone often lack the objectivity to see their own blind spots. Executive search and leadership advisory firms bring that objectivity, benchmarking internal candidates against the broader market so boards can see where their pipeline is solid and where it only looks that way. 

Boards Under Pressure

Directors know succession planning needs work. The NACD 2025 Trends and Priorities Survey found that 60% identified CEO succession planning as an important or very important area to improve. But recognition is not the same as capacity. 

Annual independent director time commitment has increased from under 250 hours to over 300 hours in the past decade. Nearly half of directors say crisis-like disruptions are more frequent than five years ago, and more than half say they are more severe. Succession planning competes with AI oversight, cybersecurity, geopolitical risk, and the baseline demands of strategy and financial performance. Something has to give, and long-term planning is usually what gives. 

Boards also struggle to evaluate their own composition objectively. They may lack directors with experience in the industry shifts the company will face, or in the leadership transitions they need to manage. Identifying those needs and finding the right people requires perspective from outside the boardroom. This is one of the reasons boards turn to advisory partners who work across industries and geographies: they can identify the governance experience a board is missing and connect them with candidates they would never encounter through their own networks. 

Assessment Before Promotion

The DDI finding that only 20 percent of organizations have successors ready for critical roles points to a deeper problem: most companies do not assess their internal talent objectively. 

One of the persistent myths in leadership is that success in one role predicts success in the next. It does not. The skills required to excel as a functional leader differ greatly from those required to run an enterprise. The behaviors that made someone effective as an individual contributor may undermine their effectiveness as an executive. 

Executive assessment provides an objective view of leadership capabilities, personality traits, and developmental needs that interviews and performance reviews miss. It answers questions that internal evaluation struggles with: 

• How does this person respond under pressure they have not yet faced here? 
• What blind spots has their current role not exposed? 
• Where will they need support that past successes have allowed them to avoid? 

Executive development builds on that assessment, creating targeted programs that address specific weaknesses. The combination of assessment and development, delivered by specialists who work across industries and leadership contexts, produces leaders who are prepared rather than merely promoted. Firms that specialize in this work see patterns across hundreds of leadership transitions, giving them a frame of reference that no single organization’s HR team can build on its own. 

Onboarding: The Most Overlooked Factor in Executive Success

Even when organizations find the right leader, many fail to support them after the hire. McKinsey research shows that tailored executive coaching and customized assimilation plans double the likelihood of a successful transition, yet only 32 percent of organizations provide them. The investment in finding the right leader means little if the organization leaves them to figure out a new culture, new relationships, and new expectations on their own. Executive onboarding ensures new leaders build the relationships they need, understand the unwritten rules that shape decisions, and avoid the early missteps that derail even well-matched hires. 

Thus, the role of a search partner does not end at placement, and the organizations that handle leadership transitions well understand this. They recognize that executive search, succession planning, board services and recruitment, executive assessment, and executive onboarding are connected disciplines. Weakness in one area undermines the others. The question is whether your organization has the internal capability to address all five, or whether some problems are better solved with partners who have seen them hundreds of times before. 

The Questions That Matter

A few questions worth asking: 

• When did your board last benchmark internal CEO candidates against external talent? 
• How many of your high-potential leaders have received formal assessment of their readiness for the next level? 
• Does your succession plan include development timelines, or just names? 
• How would you rate your last three executive onboarding experiences? 
• When a senior leader fails, do you understand why? 

If the answers come easily, you may have the internal expertise to handle what comes next. If they do not, that disconnect is worth addressing before the next transition forces the question. 

Stanton Chase has been partnering with organizations on these challenges for over three decades, with more than 70 offices across 45 countries. We work with boards and leadership teams who have decided that preparation beats reaction. 

About the Authors

Finley Konrade is Managing Director at Stanton Chase Dallas and serves as the North America Private Equity Practice Lead and Regional Vice President for North America. With over eighteen years of experience in executive search across North America, EMEA, and APAC, she works with Fortune 500 corporations, private mid-size enterprises, and private equity portfolio companies across the industrial, financial services, and consumer products sectors.  

Panos Manolopoulos is Global Vice Chair, Regions and Managing Partner at Stanton Chase, leading the firm’s Middle East and Greater China operations. As Director and majority shareholder in both markets, he’s been a driving force behind Stanton Chase’s expansion in these regions while shaping global leadership practices. Based in Dubai since 2007, he works with organizations across the Middle East and Asia to build executive teams that match the complexity of today’s business environment.