Every executive team has one. A conversation that everybody privately agrees must happen, that has been raised obliquely in three or four separate one-to-ones, that is understood on all sides to be necessary and overdue — and that keeps not happening.
It is usually about a person. Not a weak person: that would be simple, and would have been dealt with. It is about a strong one.
Derailment is a failure of strength
The literature on executive derailment is unambiguous on one point that most organisations find counter-intuitive. Senior leaders very rarely fail because they lack capability. They fail because the capability that carried them upward becomes, under sustained pressure, the thing that undoes them.
The decisiveness that made someone effective in a turnaround hardens, over time, into an unwillingness to take counsel. The exacting standard that raised the quality of everything they touched becomes a climate in which competent people conclude, quietly and individually, that it is not worth it. The drive that got the programme delivered becomes an intolerance of anything that slows it — including, eventually, the truth.
None of this is a character flaw discovered late. It is the same characteristic, doing the same thing it always did, in conditions that have changed.
The strength that carried them upward becomes, under sustained pressure, the mechanism of their failure. It is not a different quality. It is the same one, in different weather.
Why the organisation sees the effect and not the cause
The consequences show up long before anyone attributes them. Attrition rises in one part of the business. Recruitment into that part becomes measurably harder, and the reasons offered are always circumstantial. Two capable people leave within a quarter of each other and both give unremarkable reasons at exit, because giving remarkable ones would cost them a reference.
Meanwhile the leader in question is delivering. Often rather well. The numbers are the numbers, and the numbers are fine, and it is genuinely difficult to open a conversation about somebody who is hitting their targets on the grounds that something about them is corroding the organisation in ways that will not appear in any report for another two years.
So the conversation is deferred. Not refused — deferred. There is always something more urgent, and there is always a better moment coming, and the person who ought to have it is not confident they can have it well.
What the deferral actually costs
The cost compounds in three places at once, and only one of them is visible.
The leader themselves. Every month of deferral is a month in which they receive no signal, and therefore reasonably conclude that the behaviour is acceptable. By the time anyone speaks plainly, the pattern has been reinforced by eighteen months of organisational silence, and the leader — entirely justifiably — experiences the intervention as arbitrary. They were never told. What they were given, repeatedly, was feedback so carefully softened that it did not survive contact with their own self-perception.
The people around them. They can see the pattern. They have been able to see it for some time. What they are learning, from the organisation's inaction, is what the organisation actually values — and the lesson they draw is not the one anybody intended to teach.
The team that must eventually act. A problem addressed at month three requires a conversation. The same problem at month twenty requires an exit, a settlement, a replacement search, a period of instability in a function that was performing, and a set of departures by people who had been waiting to see whether anything would be done. This is a very expensive way to solve a problem that was, at the outset, entirely solvable — and it usually removes a leader the organisation would much rather have kept.
Why it is not a courage problem
It is tempting to conclude that the executives involved simply lack the nerve. This is both unkind and analytically wrong, and the wrongness matters because it points the remedy in the wrong direction.
The conversation does not happen because the organisation has no mechanism for it. Performance systems measure outputs, and the outputs are good. Values conversations are annual and generic. The one-to-one is the wrong container, because the one-to-one is where you discuss the work. And the chief executive, who is the only person with unambiguous standing to raise it, is also the person who has most invested in this leader's success and is therefore the least well placed to see the pattern clearly.
What is missing is not courage. It is a place for the conversation to happen, and someone in the room whose position does not depend on the outcome.
The single question
If you want to know whether this is live in your organisation, do not audit anything. Ask yourself one question, and answer it in the first three seconds, before the qualifications arrive.
Is there a conversation that everyone agrees must happen, and that keeps not happening?
If a name came to mind, you already know what this essay is about. The only remaining question is how many more months you intend to spend not having it — and what the person in question will have become by then, given that they are, at present, being told by everything around them that nothing is wrong.
Laszlo Cser is the founder of Vantaris Consulting, an executive leadership advisory practice working with organisations whose executive decisions carry significant commercial, operational or reputational consequence. More essays.