This collection brings together our perspectives on executive search, technology leadership and the realities of senior decision making. We look beyond the surface of leadership appointments and into the behaviours, judgement calls and cultural signals that influence organisational performance. If you are interested in how leadership really works, this is the place to start.
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Your next great leader may not be the sharpest speaker, but they will almost certainly be the best listener. We are good at measuring technical skill and cognitive ability. These are the table stakes for any executive role. Yet we still hire leaders with flawless CVs who create dysfunctional teams. This gap between competence and effectiveness is where value is destroyed.
Leadership performance in 2025 is being judged on evidence, not assertion. Boards, people leaders, and investors now have clearer data on where executive hiring is failing and which traits genuinely correlate with success. We can also see how inclusive hiring is evolving and how UK plc is progressing on representation.
You would not launch a new product without first understanding the user. So why build or sustain a leadership team without anchoring it around the customer? In too many organisations, the executive team still debates internal capacity or delivery dates. The people who pay your bills exist only as abstract figures in presentations. That kind of disconnect costs more than time. It weakens outcomes and magnifies wasted investment. Let's explore what a better approach looks like in practice.
Trust in senior leaders is also under strain. Only 14% of UK workers say they have faith in senior leaders’ decisions. That erosion shows up in slower adoption of change, more challenge behind the scenes and ultimately a higher cost of making anything stick. In this environment, the most important question is not "Is our strategy right?". A better question is, "Is the leadership system at the top capable of delivering it?".
When your business faces a critical inflection point, whether it’s a digital transformation, a turnaround, or a scale-up that has just secured funding, you can’t afford 12 months of drift. Spending that time recruiting, onboarding, and hoping the new hire finds their feet will only slow you down. What you need is precision. What you need is fractional firepower.
Mis-hiring is the silent landmine beneath your high-performing team. It’s not just a bad hire. It’s a culture destabiliser. A trust eroder. A progress killer. It may feel safe to chalk it up as “just one wrong person, ” but recent data suggests the financial and relational toll is far heavier. A mis-hire can cost up to 30 % of the employee’s first-year earnings, including lost productivity, recruitment, onboarding, and disruption. So when an executive does not fit and the cracks start showing.
What’s 2+2 in leadership hiring? The answer isn’t always 4. Especially when you forget to account for the hidden variables: character and context. Almost 50 to 70% of new executives fail within 18 months, not for lack of skill but because hiring often overlooks character, cultural fit, and adaptability. We often think of hiring as a simple maths problem. You line up competence with experience and expect to find your next great leader. Except it rarely works out that neatly.
Are you hiring for comfort or for progress? It’s an easy trap to fall into. You sit across from a candidate who reminds you of yourself ten years ago. Or maybe they mirror someone on your team who’s been successful. They “just feel right.” That’s the comfort zone of culture fit. It feels safe. It feels smooth. But here’s the risk: If everyone looks the same, thinks the same, and solves problems the same way, fresh ideas never surface.
Boardrooms no longer set the pace, the market does. Strategy now starts at the exact moment your product (or service) fails to meet the mark: the unrenewed contract, the frustrated customer call, the competitor who closes the deal you were sure was yours. The companies winning today anchor every decision, investment, and hire around their product’s ability to deliver value that customers can feel and measure.
The champagne glasses were still clinking when the cracks began to show. A star executive had been hired at lightning speed, hailed as the catalyst for change. Within half a year, departments were working at cross purposes, key metrics were falling like dominoes, and the exit package was costing more than the company’s last major project. So the real question for leaders is this: does moving fast on hiring truly put you ahead, or does it quietly set you back months and millions?
The executive mirage is what happens when we confuse presence with potential. It’s the polished speech, the poised manner, the confident stride into the boardroom that convinces us we’re looking at a high-impact leader. Traditionally, these signals have been held up as markers of leadership. Commanding tone. Sharp delivery. Decisiveness in meetings. These behaviours feel reassuring, especially under pressure.
Something that I firmly believe is an investment for any company's future is leadership development. As you will go on to read, I'm clearly not alone in that opinion. It’s common sense that training people to be better, more diligent, more focused and finding gaps in their skills is always a positive thing. It's also one of the first things to go when budget constraints are required. So, the big question: is leadership development really worth the money?
