Discover why leadership fails and executives derail. Learn the common causes of leadership failure, warning signs, and strategies to prevent career-ending mistakes.
Written by Laura Bouttell • Wed 31st December 2025
Leadership fails at rates that should concern every organisation and every aspiring leader. Over half of executives fail according to DDI's global survey of HR leaders. When 35% of internally promoted executives are considered failures—a number that rises to 47% for external hires—something fundamental is going wrong. Research from the Centre for Creative Leadership reveals that almost 40% of new chief executives fail outright within their first eighteen months.
These statistics represent more than abstract numbers. Each failure represents careers disrupted, organisations damaged, and teams demoralised. Understanding why leadership fails reveals patterns that can be prevented. The causes of derailment are predictable; the warning signs are observable; the interventions are possible. Yet leaders continue failing in ways that careful attention might prevent.
The statistics on executive failure paint a sobering picture:
| Metric | Failure Rate |
|---|---|
| All executives (DDI survey) | Over 50% |
| Internally promoted executives | 35% |
| Externally hired executives | 47% |
| New CEOs within 18 months | ~40% |
| Fortune 500 CEOs lasting 3 years | Up to one-third fail |
| Overall executive failure range | 30-75% |
These numbers reflect not occasional anomalies but systemic patterns. When failure rates approach or exceed 50%, organisations must question their selection, onboarding, and support processes.
The consequences of leadership failure extend beyond the failing individual:
Organisational disruption: Failed leadership creates operational chaos. Teams lose direction; projects stall; customers suffer.
Financial damage: Leadership failure costs organisations substantially—through direct severance, replacement costs, productivity losses, and strategic setbacks.
Cultural corrosion: Repeated leadership failure damages organisational culture. Cynicism spreads; engagement drops; trust erodes.
Talent loss: Strong performers may leave rather than endure failed leadership. Organisations lose exactly the talent they most need.
Succession vulnerability: Each failure depletes leadership bench and damages confidence in internal succession processes.
Reputational harm: Visible leadership failures damage employer brands and external reputation, affecting customer and investor confidence.
Researchers Cynthia McCauley and Michael Lombardo identified the most common causes of leadership derailment, many rooted in personality:
The derailers:
Insensitive, abrasive, or bullying style — Leaders who mistreat others eventually lose support and cooperation essential to effectiveness.
Aloofness or arrogance — Leaders who distance themselves from others miss critical information and alienate those they need.
Betrayal of personal trust — Leaders who violate trust destroy relationships that cannot be easily rebuilt.
Self-centred ambition — Leaders prioritising personal advancement over organisational or team needs eventually face consequences.
Failure to address obvious problems — Leaders who avoid difficult issues allow problems to compound until they become insurmountable.
Inability to select good subordinates — Leaders who build weak teams lack the capability to execute through others.
Inability to take long-term perspective — Leaders focused only on immediate results sacrifice future health for present metrics.
Inability to adapt to bosses with different styles — Leaders who cannot flex to different leadership contexts limit their effectiveness.
Overdependence on mentors — Leaders who rely too heavily on sponsors become vulnerable when that support disappears.
Additional characteristics associated with derailment include argumentativeness, egocentrism, aggressiveness, volatility, lack of self-awareness, lack of trustworthiness, conflict seeking, and aloofness.
Research by Claudio Fernández-Aráoz found that CEOs who failed were hired on the basis of their drive, IQ, and business expertise—but fired for lack of emotional intelligence. This pattern reveals a fundamental hiring mistake:
Selection bias: Organisations often select leaders based on technical competence and track record while underweighting emotional and interpersonal capabilities.
The competence trap: Technical excellence that enabled earlier success may not predict leadership effectiveness. The skills that made someone a great individual contributor may be irrelevant or even counterproductive as a leader.
Relationship neglect: Leaders lacking emotional intelligence fail to build relationships essential for influence, information gathering, and collaborative execution.
Self-awareness absence: Without emotional intelligence, leaders lack awareness of their impact on others. They repeat destructive patterns without recognising the damage they cause.
Stress vulnerability: Leaders with low emotional intelligence handle pressure poorly. Under stress, their worst tendencies emerge, damaging relationships and judgment.
Harvard Business Review research involving interviews with more than one hundred CEOs and senior executives identified three main patterns of leadership team dysfunction:
The shark tank: Characterised by infighting and political manoeuvring. Energy that should serve customers flows into internal competition. Team members pursue individual agendas at collective expense.
The petting zoo: Characterised by conflict avoidance and overemphasis on collaboration. Decisions that require debate proceed without challenge. Problems that need confrontation go unaddressed to preserve superficial harmony.
The mediocracy: Characterised by complacency, lack of competence, and unhealthy focus on past success. Yesterday's achievements substitute for today's performance. Standards decline because challenge feels uncomfortable.
These patterns reveal that failure isn't always individual—it can be collective. Dysfunctional leadership teams fail even when individual members might succeed in healthier contexts.
DDI research on executive transitions reveals alarming failure rates and identifies contributing factors:
Unrealistic expectations: According to a prominent Fortune 500 management consultant, 54% of promoted executives lacked realistic expectations of what an executive role entailed. This expectation gap creates impossible situations.
Insufficient onboarding: Many organisations fail to provide adequate transition support. Executives are expected to perform immediately without proper orientation to role, relationships, and context.
Network building failure: Executives used to operating independently struggle to build networks essential at senior levels. They don't recognise that executive effectiveness requires broad relationships.
Scope expansion shock: Moving from functional to enterprise leadership requires dramatic perspective shift. Leaders who cannot expand their scope fail despite prior functional excellence.
Political naivety: Senior roles involve political dynamics unfamiliar to those promoted from technical or operational backgrounds. Political skill gaps prove fatal.
Cultural misreading: External hires particularly struggle to read and adapt to new organisational cultures. What worked elsewhere fails in new contexts.
CEO failure involves distinctive dynamics:
Board relationship breakdown: CEOs who cannot maintain productive board relationships face governance challenges that constrain effectiveness or terminate tenure.
Strategy execution failure: CEOs may articulate compelling visions but fail to translate strategy into operational reality. Vision without execution produces disappointment.
Stakeholder management failure: Modern CEOs must balance multiple stakeholders—investors, employees, customers, regulators, communities. Failure to manage this complexity leads to conflict and failure.
Misconduct: Research shows that personal misconduct has become a leading cause of CEO departure, surpassing poor financial performance. Ethics failures increasingly terminate CEO careers.
Succession neglect: CEOs who fail to develop succession capabilities leave organisations vulnerable and boards concerned about continuity.
Change leadership failure: In environments requiring transformation, CEOs who cannot lead change fail despite other capabilities. Transformation demands distinctive leadership.
First-time leadership involves transitions that trip many new leaders:
Identity confusion: New leaders often struggle to shift identity from individual contributor to people leader. They continue trying to succeed through personal excellence rather than enabling team success.
Delegation failure: Leaders promoted for technical excellence often cannot delegate. They micromanage or do the work themselves rather than developing and trusting team members.
Feedback avoidance: New leaders frequently avoid difficult feedback conversations. Problems that should be addressed early compound through avoidance.
Relationship boundary confusion: Leaders promoted from within teams struggle to recalibrate peer relationships into reporting relationships. Former colleagues may test new boundaries.
Performance pressure: New leaders face intense pressure to prove themselves, sometimes making rushed decisions or overreaching to demonstrate competence.
Leadership failure rarely arrives without warning. Early indicators include:
Relationship deterioration: When leaders' relationships with key stakeholders—bosses, peers, direct reports, board members—begin deteriorating, failure risk increases.
Feedback rejection: Leaders who dismiss or attack feedback signal dangerous lack of self-awareness. Feedback resistance precedes many failures.
Isolation increasing: Leaders withdrawing from relationships and operating increasingly independently lose the information and support essential to effectiveness.
Blame attribution: Leaders who consistently attribute problems to others rather than examining their own contribution demonstrate defensive patterns associated with failure.
Results declining: Deteriorating team or organisational performance under a leader's watch often signals leadership problems, though attribution requires careful analysis.
Stress manifestation: Leaders under excessive stress may display behaviours—volatility, withdrawal, rigidity—that damage effectiveness and signal trouble.
Ethics compromise: Even small ethical compromises can signal larger problems. Leaders bending rules in minor ways may be approaching major violations.
Systematic identification of at-risk leaders requires:
360-degree feedback analysis: Regular multi-source feedback identifies concerning patterns before they become critical. Declining scores or persistent negative themes warrant attention.
Performance trend monitoring: Track performance trajectory, not just current results. Declining trends may indicate leadership problems even when absolute performance remains acceptable.
Relationship quality assessment: Evaluate leaders' relationships with key stakeholders. Deteriorating relationships signal risk regardless of current performance.
Stress indicator monitoring: Watch for signs of excessive stress: health problems, relationship difficulties, behaviour changes, work pattern disruptions.
Exit interview analysis: When talented people leave a leader's organisation, exit interviews may reveal leadership problems driving departure.
Behavioural observation: Direct observation of leadership behaviour in various contexts reveals patterns assessments may miss.
Organisations can significantly reduce leadership failure through systematic approaches:
Improved selection: Move beyond track record and technical competence to assess emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and relationship capability. Use robust assessment methods including simulations and behavioural interviews.
Transition support: Provide comprehensive onboarding for new executives. Don't assume that leaders who succeeded elsewhere will automatically succeed here.
Coaching investment: Executive coaching reduces failure rates significantly. High-quality leadership development can improve success rates by up to 50%.
Early warning systems: Establish mechanisms to identify struggling leaders before failure becomes complete. Regular check-ins, 360-degree feedback, and relationship monitoring enable early intervention.
Realistic previewing: Ensure leaders understand what roles actually require. Unrealistic expectations set leaders up for failure.
Support infrastructure: Provide leaders with support they need—mentoring, peer relationships, coaching access, development resources. Don't expect leaders to succeed alone.
Accountability without abandonment: Hold leaders accountable for performance while providing support to address challenges. Accountability without support produces failure; support without accountability enables underperformance.
Leaders can protect themselves from derailment through:
Self-awareness cultivation: Actively seek feedback on your impact and behaviour. Self-awareness gaps correlate with failure; closing them reduces risk.
Relationship investment: Build and maintain strong relationships with bosses, peers, direct reports, and other stakeholders. Relationship capital provides both support and early warning.
Stress management: Recognise your stress responses and maintain practices that sustain resilience. Leaders who burn out fail; sustainable practice enables sustained performance.
Continuous development: Never stop developing. The capabilities that enabled past success may not suffice for future challenges.
Coaching engagement: Engage with coaching that provides honest feedback and development support. Coaches often see what leaders cannot see themselves.
Vulnerability acknowledgment: Recognise your weaknesses and derailers. Understanding your vulnerabilities enables managing them.
Ethics maintenance: Maintain strong ethical boundaries. Small compromises create larger problems; integrity protects against many failure modes.
Network cultivation: Build diverse networks that provide perspective, support, and information. Isolated leaders lack resources to navigate challenges.
When leaders show signs of struggle, organisations should:
Act early: Intervene before failure becomes complete. Early intervention when leaders struggle often succeeds; late intervention rarely does.
Diagnose accurately: Understand what's causing difficulty. Different causes require different interventions.
Provide targeted support: Match support to diagnosed needs. Coaching for skill gaps; mentoring for context understanding; reduced scope for overwhelm.
Create safe space: Allow leaders to acknowledge struggle without career-ending consequences. If admitting difficulty means termination, leaders will hide problems until too late.
Set clear expectations: Clarify what improvement looks like and by when. Ambiguous expectations allow problems to persist.
Monitor progress: Track whether intervention is working. If progress isn't occurring, adjust approach or make difficult decisions.
Make tough calls: When intervention isn't working, make necessary decisions. Prolonging failing situations damages everyone.
Leadership failure doesn't have to be career-ending. Recovery is possible through:
Honest self-reflection: Leaders who can honestly assess what went wrong—including their own contribution—position themselves for recovery.
Learning extraction: Failure teaches if leaders allow it. Understanding what went wrong enables avoiding similar patterns.
Capability development: Addressing gaps that contributed to failure—through coaching, training, or intentional practice—builds capability for future success.
Relationship repair: Where possible, repairing damaged relationships demonstrates growth and rebuilds trust.
Context selection: Leaders may succeed in contexts that fit their capabilities better than roles where they failed. Finding better fit enables recovery.
Time and demonstration: Recovery requires time for demonstration of changed behaviour. Past failure fades as current success accumulates.
Leaders who recover share characteristics:
Growth mindset: Viewing failure as learning opportunity rather than permanent identity enables recovery.
Support network: Leaders with strong personal and professional relationships have resources for recovery that isolated leaders lack.
Self-compassion: Leaders who can forgive themselves while learning from mistakes maintain mental health essential for recovery.
Perspective: Leaders who maintain perspective—recognising that career setbacks don't define their worth—recover better than those who catastrophise.
Action orientation: Leaders who respond to failure with productive action recover faster than those who ruminate without acting.
Help acceptance: Leaders willing to accept help—from coaches, mentors, therapists, or supporters—access resources that accelerate recovery.
Leaders fail due to combinations of personality factors (arrogance, insensitivity, self-centredness), skill deficits (particularly emotional intelligence), situational challenges (transition difficulties, culture mismatch), and support failures (inadequate onboarding, insufficient development). Research identifies specific derailers including betrayal of trust, failure to address problems, inability to adapt, and overdependence on mentors.
Research indicates over 50% of executives fail according to DDI's global survey of HR leaders. Specifically, 35% of internally promoted executives are considered failures, rising to 47% for external hires. Studies show up to 40% of new CEOs fail within their first eighteen months, with Fortune 500 CEO failure rates ranging from 30-75%.
Warning signs of impending leadership failure include deteriorating relationships with key stakeholders, rejection of feedback, increasing isolation, blame attribution to others, declining team performance, visible stress manifestations, and ethical compromises. Early identification of these signs enables intervention before failure becomes complete.
Failed leaders can recover through honest self-reflection, learning extraction from failure experiences, capability development addressing identified gaps, relationship repair where possible, finding contexts that better fit their capabilities, and demonstrated changed behaviour over time. Recovery requires growth mindset, support networks, and willingness to accept help.
Executive transitions fail often because many promoted executives (54%) lack realistic expectations about what executive roles entail, organisations provide insufficient onboarding support, leaders struggle to build networks essential at senior levels, and the scope expansion from functional to enterprise leadership overwhelms those unprepared for the shift.
Emotional intelligence significantly affects leadership failure. Research shows executives are often hired for drive, IQ, and business expertise but fired for emotional intelligence deficits. Leaders lacking self-awareness, relationship skills, and emotional regulation damage relationships essential for effectiveness and handle stress poorly, increasing failure risk.
Organisations can prevent leadership failure through improved selection assessing emotional intelligence alongside technical capability, comprehensive transition support for new executives, executive coaching investment, early warning systems identifying struggling leaders, realistic role previewing, support infrastructure provision, and balanced accountability with support.
Leadership failure, despite its prevalence, is substantially preventable. The patterns are predictable: personality factors that derail, emotional intelligence deficits that undermine relationships, transition challenges that overwhelm, and support failures that leave leaders struggling alone.
Organisations that take failure prevention seriously can significantly reduce failure rates. Better selection that looks beyond track record to assess emotional intelligence and self-awareness. Comprehensive transition support that prepares leaders for new contexts. Coaching investment that provides ongoing development and early warning. Systems that identify struggling leaders before failure becomes complete.
Individual leaders can protect themselves through self-awareness cultivation, relationship investment, stress management, continuous development, and ethics maintenance. Leaders who understand their vulnerabilities can manage them. Leaders who build support networks have resources for navigating challenges.
Perhaps most importantly, organisations and leaders alike must accept that failure prevention requires ongoing attention. The executive who succeeded yesterday may fail tomorrow if circumstances change and capabilities don't evolve. The organisation with low failure rates now may see them increase if selection and support processes deteriorate.
Leadership failure damages organisations, teams, and individual careers. It wastes potential and creates suffering. Yet its prevalence reflects not inevitability but insufficient attention to prevention. The organisations that prioritise failure prevention see dramatically different outcomes than those that don't.
Understanding why leadership fails reveals what to do differently. The knowledge exists; the question is whether organisations and leaders will apply it. Those who do will see fewer failures, stronger leadership, and better outcomes for everyone involved.