Why can an executive who was highly successful in one organisation struggle in the next?

How much of executive success belongs to the executive, and how much is created by the environment around them?

We talk about successful executives as though success is something they possess.

She transformed the business. He rebuilt the tech function. She doubled revenue. He led the turnaround. They took the company through an IPO. They did this. They did that......

Those achievements matter. Of course they do.

I've spent more than 20 years assessing executives this way. Much of executive search is, quite reasonably, an attempt to understand what someone has done before and whether that experience tells us anything useful about what they might be capable of doing next.

But its important to remember, that none of those achievements happened in isolation.

They happened with a particular CEO, board and executive team, within a particular culture and at a certain point in the organisation's development. There was an existing team beneath them, a particular amount of authority and a network of relationships that developed over time.

We don't always get to see those things from the outside. We see this phenomenon in sports all the time. A brilliant footballer can move to another club and suddenly struggle to make an impact. We don't assume they've forgotten how to play football overnight. We can see that the manager has changed, the system is different, the teammates are different, or they're being asked to play a subtly different role.

Yet when we hire executives, I wonder whether we sometimes attribute more of their previous success to the individual than we should.

Which leaves me with a question I've become increasingly interested in: when we hire a successful executive, how much of what made them successful actually comes with them?

Perhaps success isn't what transfers

The research on this is super interesting, partly because it doesn't give us a particularly neat answer.

Previous experience can absolutely help. Related experience provides knowledge and skill.

Executives carry strategic expertise, tacit know-how, routines and practices between organisations. Deep expertise can transfer particularly well when the new organisation is dealing with a problem the executive genuinely understands.

That's exactly why experience carries so much weight in executive hiring. If I need someone to lead a major technology transformation, there is obvious value in talking to people who have successfully led one before.

But success itself isn't what transfers to the new role.

What moves between organisations is the collection of things an executive accumulated while becoming successful: knowledge, judgement, functional expertise, tacit know-how, relationships, reputation and, importantly, assumptions about how things get done. Some of those travel remarkably well. Deep expertise doesn't disappear when someone changes employers, nor does the judgement accumulated through difficult situations or the pattern recognition developed over a career.

Other things are much less portable. Relationships stay behind. Organisational knowledge loses some of its value. Ways of working that were highly effective might depend on systems, people or resources that don't exist in the next organisation.

And then there are the assumptions. That's where it gets interesting.

Experience teaches us what works. Sometimes too well.

If you've solved a difficult problem successfully before, you inevitably learn from it. You develop ways of interpreting situations. You learn where to start, what to look for and what tends to work.

That's one of the great advantages of experience. It's also potentially one of its weaknesses.

Research into career mobility suggests prior experience can improve performance through knowledge and skill while simultaneously introducing factors that interfere with applying that experience in a different setting. Previous roles leave an imprint. They shape not only what people know, but how they interpret what they encounter next.

There's a similar tension in the executive succession literature. Some large CEO studies have found that previous CEO experience doesn't automatically translate into better performance in the next organisation. Other research finds benefits from deep expertise, varied experience and particular kinds of previous leadership experience. So the evidence isn't telling us that experience is good or bad. It's telling us something more useful: its value depends partly on how well it fits the next environment and how effectively the executive adapts it.

Experience gives us a playbook. The danger comes when we fail to recognise that the game has changed.

Same title. Very different job.

Consider a CIO who accepts a role that, on paper, looks remarkably similar to the one in which she's just been highly successful.

In her previous organisation, technology investment was well understood. She had direct access to the CEO, a strong leadership team she'd largely built and considerable credibility across the business.

The new organisation is different. Every significant investment has to be fought for. The inherited team needs rebuilding. Her role sits one step further away from the decisions she's expected to influence. And while the mandate says "transformation", three members of the executive team seem to have three different interpretations of what that actually means.

Her capability hasn't changed. The environment in which she's being asked to apply it has.

This was something I explored last week when writing about whether having been a CIO before necessarily means someone has done your CIO job before. The research into CIO effectiveness makes the point particularly well. Different CIO roles require different combinations of technology leadership, strategic influence, innovation, business thinking and relationship management. Effectiveness is also associated with things beyond the individual's capability, including hierarchical position, management environment and technology maturity.

Which means we can hire an executive with exactly the experience we think we need and still change some of the variables that helped make that experience successful in the first place.

What gets left behind doesn't appear on the CV

Think about an executive who has been highly effective in an organisation for five or six years.

They know how decisions really get made. They understand how the CEO likes to work, where resistance is likely to come from, who carries influence beyond their job title and which stakeholders need to be involved before an important decision reaches the formal meeting.

More importantly, other people know them. They've built credibility. People have seen their judgement tested, watched them make difficult decisions and learned how they operate.

Then they change organisations.

Their expertise comes with them. Much of their credibility doesn't.

Formal authority can be granted on day one. Trust, legitimacy and political capital have to be rebuilt. The broader research into leadership transitions reflects this. Becoming effective in a new organisation isn't simply a process of acquiring information. It involves adjustment, relationships, identity and social validation within the new environment.

Precisely because someone is senior and experienced, I think we sometimes underestimate just how significant that reset can be.

Having knowledge isn't the same as being able to use it

There's another finding from the research I keep coming back to.

When someone moves between organisations, their knowledge doesn't automatically become the new organisation's knowledge.

Research into employee mobility suggests valuable know-how can remain concentrated in the individual or among a small number of immediate collaborators. Whether the organisation benefits from it depends partly on opportunities to transfer it, whether other people are receptive and whether the organisation has the capability to absorb and use it.

Hire a CIO precisely because they've successfully led a major transformation and they may arrive knowing an enormous amount about transformation. But they can't simply upload that experience into the organisation.

Their peers have to trust their judgement. The CEO has to support the direction. The inherited team needs the capability to execute it. Investment needs to be available. Other parts of the organisation need to be willing and able to change.

Possessing valuable knowledge and converting it into organisational performance are two different things.

But this can't become an excuse for the executive

There's an obvious danger in all of this. If executive effectiveness is partly contextual, almost any failed appointment can be explained away by blaming the organisation. And I hear this all the time!

Sometimes the executive simply wasn't right. And sometimes a very capable executive contributes substantially to their own downfall.

They can arrive with too much certainty, begin applying solutions before properly understanding the problem or underestimate the importance of relationships because they believe the quality of their ideas should be enough. They might interpret resistance as evidence that the organisation needs to change rather than information that they need to adjust their own approach.

Past success can make that harder. If an approach has worked exceptionally well for you for ten years, why wouldn't you trust it?

That's the interesting tension around experience. Three successful transformations can provide extraordinary pattern recognition, but they can also leave someone convinced that transformations should be run in a particular way.

The skill isn't in forgetting what you've learned. It's in working out which parts still apply.

What this changes about how we hire

None of this makes me value track record less. It makes me interrogate it differently.

When someone tells me an executive transformed a business, I'm still interested in what they achieved. But increasingly I'm also interested in the conditions around it. What authority did they actually have? What team did they inherit? What did the CEO do? How mature was the organisation? What was already working before they arrived?

And I'm particularly interested in what happened when things went wrong. Where did they encounter resistance? Which assumptions turned out to be false? What did they change about their own approach? How quickly did they realise a change was needed, and how did they decide what to change?

Because what I'm really trying to establish isn't only whether someone's experience fits the problem. It's whether they can recognise when it doesn't.

There's an interesting body of work around adaptability, learning agility, feedback seeking and cognitive flexibility, although the direct evidence connecting some of these constructs specifically to successful executive transitions remains thinner than we might assume.

Still, there's one question I've increasingly come to like asking:

Tell me about a time when your experience told you to do one thing and the organisation eventually taught you that you were wrong.

I learn a lot from the answer.

Before your next move, take your own success apart

There's a version of this for executives themselves.

Before your next role, try doing something we rarely do when looking back on a successful period in our careers. Don't just ask what did I achieve? Ask what allowed me to achieve it?

Which relationships made you more effective? How much authority did you really have?

What did your CEO do that enabled you to operate? How strong was the team around you?

How receptive was the organisation to the changes you wanted to make?

Then comes the harder question: which parts of my success came from capabilities I genuinely carry with me, and which depended on conditions that may not exist in my next organisation?

I don't think that diminishes the achievement. If anything, understanding the difference requires considerably more self-awareness than simply attributing the result to your own leadership.

Once you understand the conditions that made you effective, you can also ask much sharper questions about the next opportunity. A transformation mandate sounds attractive, but does the executive team actually agree on what needs transforming? The CEO says technology is strategic, but how are investment decisions really made? You're being hired to make significant changes, but what authority will you actually have?

If those conditions aren't there, it doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't take the job. The question becomes whether you have the mandate, support and time to create them.

Perhaps that's the reflection I'd encourage any executive considering their next move to spend some time on:

What made me effective last time, and what will I need to do differently here?

Day one changes the question

That same idea has implications for the organisation making the appointment.

We can define the mandate properly, understand the organisational context, search thoroughly, assess candidates rigorously and eventually appoint someone we're genuinely confident can do the job.

But the moment they join, the nature of the problem changes.

Before the appointment, we're trying to establish whether this person can succeed here. Once they've arrived, we're trying to work out what it will take for them to become successful here.

The executive has to discover the real organisation beneath the one they encountered during the recruitment process. They need to test assumptions, establish credibility, build relationships, understand informal power structures and work out where and how quickly they can push for change.

At the same time, the organisation is learning about them. Their peers are deciding whether they trust them. The CEO is discovering how they operate under pressure. The inherited team is working out what the appointment means, while other executives are discovering where the new leader's mandate begins and where theirs ends.

That's why I increasingly think executive integration is better understood as a process of mutual adjustment. The research describes a similar interaction between leader and organisation, rather than a one-way process in which the newcomer simply learns how "Things are done differently here."

Integration isn't simply something we do to an executive. It's something that happens between an executive and an organisation.

So how much of executive success belongs to the executive?

Well, I don't think there's a percentage. Perhaps the question itself contains the wrong assumption.

Capability matters. Judgement matters. Experience matters. Character matters. But success isn't something an executive can pack into a suitcase and carry from one organisation to another.

What travels is knowledge, expertise, judgement, tacit know-how, reputation and lessons accumulated through experience. Their value in the next organisation depends on fit, adaptation and whether the organisation can actually make use of what the person brings.

The organisation contributes another set of variables: its people, culture, strategy, authority structures, capabilities, politics, expectations and appetite for change.

Perhaps that's why I've become less interested in describing someone simply as a "successful executive."

They've been successful somewhere.

When we appoint them, we're making a judgement that they have the capability and experience to become successful here.

What happens next depends on them. But it also depends on what they've just joined.

We're not transferring success from one organisation to another. We're bringing an experienced executive into a new system and finding out what the two are capable of achieving together.

This is the foundation on which our integration coaching is built.