Every New Leader Needs a Coach, Not Just the Ones in Trouble

New leaders, who fail, don't usually fail because they lack talent. They fail because the first months in a role are a period of acute exposure: old habits meet a new context, expectations go unspoken, and the support that would catch a stumble often isn't there yet.

Executive-hiring research puts the failure rate for senior leaders at 30% to 50%, ending in firing or resignation within the first 18 months. That's a strikingly short runway for someone hired to lead.

Failure looks like a transition problem, not a competence problem

Michael Watkins' research is the clearest lens on why this happens. Across The First 90 Days and related work, he argues that leaders derail early for a consistent set of reasons:

• They apply the wrong playbook. What worked in a start-up won't work in a turnaround, and what worked in a turnaround won't work when the job is simply sustaining success. Leaders who don't diagnose the situation correctly bring the wrong strategy to it.

• They don't learn fast enough. Understanding the business, the culture, and the politics of a new organisation takes deliberate effort — and leaders who skip it stay reactive for too long.

• Expectations stay unclear. Success isn't explicitly negotiated with the people who define it, so the leader and the organisation quietly drift apart on what "doing well" even means.

• They don't build alliances early. Teams and coalitions take time to form, and leaders who delay this find themselves isolated exactly when they need support.

• They don't manage themselves. Style mismatches, low self-awareness, and unmanaged stress compound every other problem on this list.

  
  

Successor transitions add a further wrinkle: research on CEO succession describes a distinct failure pattern rooted in the psychological tug-of-war between an outgoing leader reluctant to fully let go and a successor under pressure to prove themselves fast. The proposed fix there isn't more competence, it's better relationship management, active communication, and a deliberate personal support network.

The support gap is the common thread

Look across this research and a pattern emerges that has less to do with skill and more to do with isolation. Leaders who fail often can't get others to take up matching roles around them. Organisations are frequently averse to even naming failure while it's happening, which delays the honest conversations that could redirect a struggling leader. And separately, research on workplace voice shows that speaking up before a problem escalates is risky and often withheld — people stay quiet because of power dynamics and fear of career cost, not because they don't see the problem. Leaders shape whether that silence breaks: openness and active solicitation increase voice, while threat and inattention suppress it.

Put together, this is a picture of leaders navigating high-stakes transitions largely on their own,

misreading situations, delaying hard conversations, and lacking a structured, low-risk space to say "this part isn't working" before it becomes a crisis.

How a coach changes the equation

A coach in the first six months directly addresses the mechanisms this research identifies as the real drivers of failure:

• A structured outside perspective for situational diagnosis — helping a leader correctly read whether they're in a turnaround, a growth phase, or a realignment, rather than defaulting to whatever worked last time.

• A confidential space to voice uncertainty early — exactly the kind of low-risk channel that the voice research shows is otherwise missing, before silence turns into regret.

• Accountability for the unglamorous basics — learning the business, clarifying expectations, and building alliances — the tasks Watkins' research ties most directly to successful transitions.

• A buffer against isolation — someone whose role is explicitly to notice when a leader is drifting into the identity threat, defensiveness, or self-stigma that the research shows blocks people from seeking help once failure starts to loom.

None of this requires assuming a leader is failing, or even at risk. It requires recognising that the first six months are structurally difficult for almost anyone, in ways that have little to do with individual capability. The research is consistent on one point: leaders rarely derail from a single bad decision. They derail from small misreadings and unspoken tensions that compound, quietly, when no one is checking in.

That's the case for coaching — not as a remedial intervention, but as a standard part of how organisations set every new leader up to succeed.

At Vantyr Group, we've never believed our responsibility ends once an executive accepts an offer. In reality, that's when the most important work begins. By combining executive search, leadership assessment and structured executive coaching throughout the first six months, we help leaders navigate complexity, build credibility faster and accelerate their impact. Because the measure of a successful search isn't whether someone accepts the role. It's whether they're still succeeding in it years later.