Hi {{first_name}}

I have worked with several leaders who knew, long before they were ready to say it aloud, that a senior appointment was not working.

They were not avoiding an obvious decision. Most times, there were perfectly good reasons to hesitate. The person had joined at a difficult time. They had inherited a team with problems of its own, and there had been enough glimpses of what they might eventually bring to the role to make a quick judgement feel unfair. Senior appointments need time, particularly when the person is being asked to change something rather than simply maintain it.

Yet something else was happening alongside this patience. Other executives compensated for the gaps. Decisions were finding their way back to the CEO. Work was being completed, but not always by the person who was supposed to be accountable for it. Conversations about performance produced explanations, support plans, and revised expectations, but not enough sustained improvement. Nobody had formally concluded that the appointment had failed, although the organisation was already beginning to behave as if it had.

What interests me is the point at which giving someone a fair opportunity becomes a way of postponing a conclusion we have already reached. This point rarely appears clearly, and I doubt we can identify it by adding another measure to a performance dashboard. More often, it appears in the changing nature of the conversation. We stop asking what the person needs in order to succeed and start searching for another reason the evidence is not yet conclusive.

This is difficult because people usually regard patience as the more generous choice. It may also be the right one. People can recover from a poor start. Organisations can design roles badly, and even a very capable executive can struggle when unclear expectations or missing support hinder them. I would be concerned by a leader who treated every disappointing first quarter as proof of a bad appointment.

But waiting is not generous simply because it avoids an immediate ending. While the leader continues to evaluate, the business adapts. A capable colleague takes on part of the role because something needs to move. The CEO becomes more involved in decisions they expected to hand over to others. Team members figure out which concerns they should bring to others if they want a response. These adjustments blur accountability, place extra weight on strong performers, and slowly reduce what people expect from the role.

There is an uncomfortable complication here. Workarounds reveal not only that somebody is struggling; they can make it harder for that person to recover. A CEO who repeatedly steps in may unintentionally weaken the authority of the role. Colleagues who seek decisions elsewhere can prevent the new executive from establishing their own judgement. Before concluding that the person cannot perform, the leader therefore must ask whether the organisation has set clear expectations, granted sufficient authority, and provided a genuine opportunity to carry the responsibility for which they appointed them.

This means that the actual choice is not between acting and doing nothing. It is between different forms of disruption. Ending an appointment can be costly and unsettling, but keeping it in place while other people compensate has a cost as well. The impact of the latter escapes notice because it spreads across meetings, delayed decisions, additional checking, and the quiet frustration of colleagues.

A recent study by Robert Langan in the Strategic Management Journal sharpened this distinction for me. It found that boards were slower to remove a poorly performing CEO appointed after an interim leader, primarily because another transition could create genuine harm for the organisation, not because directors were defending their reputations. That is important. We should not dismiss concern about stability as avoidance. The more useful question is whether waiting is preserving stability or merely deferring disruption while the business quietly reorganises itself around the gap.

When I explore this with a leader, the discussion often begins with evidence. We talk about the leader’s expectations, the actual outcomes, and whether closing the gap is feasible. At some point, however, the appointment itself enters the room. The leader chose this person, argued for them, or reassured others when early concerns appeared. A decision about performance now seems to carry a verdict on their own judgement.

I do not think this is vanity. Senior appointments matter, and good leaders should take responsibility for the decisions they make. The difficulty arises when responsibility turns into self-evaluation. Instead of asking what the business and the individual now need, the leader is also contending with a quieter question: what will it say about me if I admit that this has not worked?

This is one place where the Mask can influence leadership judgement without making itself obvious. In my Leading Unmasked approach, the Mask is a learned nervous system strategy organised around preventing discovery of the false belief, ‘I am not enough’. When the possibility of having made a poor appointment feels exposing, the Mask can shape how the leader interprets the evidence. Because it operates through our own thoughts, its conclusions can sound entirely reasonable.

The difficulty is that the reasons for waiting may be valid. The restructuring may need to settle. Employment processes, board alignment, or the absence of a credible replacement may constrain what can happen immediately. The Mask becomes relevant when those realities are repeatedly used to move the evidential threshold, avoid beginning the necessary process, or postpone contingency planning. Structural constraints may influence the timing of when one can make a change. They should not alter an honest assessment of whether the appointment is working.

I have found it more useful to move away from whether the original appointment was a mistake. That question encourages the leader to revisit the recruitment process and defend the judgement they made with the information available at the time. It may produce a valuable lesson later, but it rarely helps them see the current situation more clearly.

Instead, I ask:

If this role were vacant today, and you knew everything you know now, would you appoint this person to it?

The answer does not decide what happens next, and the comparison should not be with an imaginary candidate who arrives without flaws or transition costs. A ‘no’ may reveal that the role has changed, that the organisation has not created the conditions for success, or that a specific capability gap remains. What the question does is separate present confidence from the hope, effort, and reputation already invested in the appointment.

The next conversation can then be more honest. What is not working, in observable terms? Is the problem one of capability, or has the role been weakened by unclear authority, poor design, or people working around it? What would need to change in the person and in the surrounding system for success to become realistic? Another period of support may be appropriate, but it should test both sides of that equation. The leader may need to restore decision rights, redirect bypassed decisions back into the role, and stop compensating for gaps that the person is being asked to close.

The review also needs a straightforward test and a credible next step. What improvement would be visible, by when, and what would happen if it does not appear? At senior level, that may require discreet alignment with HR, the board, or other stakeholders, as well as contingency planning for interim cover or a replacement. These practical constraints can influence the route forward, but they should not become another reason to leave the conclusion undefined.

I also think this honesty is kinder than it first appears. Few things are more corrosive than continuing in a senior role while colleagues quietly lose confidence and build workarounds around you. The person deserves an opportunity to respond to the real assessment, not a softened version of it. Their colleagues deserve clarity about where responsibility sits, and the leader deserves to make the current decision without turning it into a trial of their past judgement.

More time may still be the right decision. But it is a decision, with consequences for the person, the team, and the business. The question is not simply whether you can justify waiting. It is whether waiting remains the most responsible use of the evidence you now have.

Best,

Gavin