The call always comes later than you would expect.
When a senior appointment goes wrong quickly, nobody needs to call me. It is obvious. The person cannot do the job, or the job was not the one they were sold, and it resolves itself inside a quarter.
The calls I get come much further in. Someone capable, hired carefully, who was doing well. Nothing has visibly gone wrong. The board cannot point to a failure. But something has changed, nobody can name it, and three months later that person resigns.
Of the senior appointments ecap made across the Gulf in 2021 and 2022, more than two-thirds were still in post two years on. Only 6% left in the first six months. The departures that did happen came later, once the leader had apparently settled in.
The quiet part
The early months are generous. Nobody expects much, everyone is helpful, and the new leader is still asking questions rather than changing things. It tells you very little.
The difficulty starts when they begin to act.
They raise something in a meeting that everyone already knows and nobody says. They propose a change that cuts across how a colleague has worked for nine years. They escalate a problem expecting it to be solved and watch it get smoothed over instead. None of this is dramatic, and each one teaches the same lesson: the organisation will tolerate them but it will not change for them.
A capable person absorbs that two or three times. Then they stop raising things.
From the outside, this looks like settling in. It is the opposite, and the resignation often follows months later. By the time anyone notices, the moment that started it passed months earlier, in a meeting nobody thought worth recording.
Amy Edmondson’s work at Harvard found that whether a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking strongly influences whether its members raise problems at all, and that in turn predicts how it performs. Boston Consulting Group’s 2024 study of 28,000 professionals across sixteen countries put a number on the consequence: twelve per cent of those with the lowest psychological safety said they were likely to leave within a year, against three per cent where it was high.
The seat has a history
Here is the part boards rarely examine.
When a role comes to us, the candidate requirements are usually examined in depth. What is less often explored is the history of the position itself. We are told what the job requires, but not always what happened to the last person in it, or the one before that.
If a seat has turned over twice in four years, the common factor is not the two people who sat in it. It is the seat. Something about the reporting line, the authority that was promised and not given, the peer who was passed over for the role, or the brief that was never really agreed at board level. The next appointment can meet exactly the same conditions, while the search progresses without those underlying dynamics ever being fully surfaced.
That history is usually knowable. It just requires asking the question before the search starts rather than after it fails.
A few years ago we were asked to find a Group Chief Operating Officer for a group owned by a prominent GCC entity. The group had grown quickly, bringing several businesses under one umbrella, and the brief was compelling: integrate the portfolio, standardise operations, deliver the value the growth strategy had promised. The picture only changed when we spoke to the last person to hold the role. He was the second in three years. Both had arrived with an operating model signed off by the board, and both had found that the real decisions were still made elsewhere. Significant budgets, senior hires, anything touching the most important assets went to the owner’s leadership, often after an informal conversation neither of them was part of. Several business heads had long-standing relationships with the owner and had learned they could go around the COO. So they did, politely and consistently.
We took this to the Chairman before approaching a single candidate. It was not an easy conversation. In this region, raising how an owner exercises its influence is rarely done in a first meeting, and never bluntly. But it changed the mandate. The delegation of authority was rewritten and formally ratified, the business heads moved into a direct reporting line, and the owner’s representatives agreed to send operational questions back through the executive rather than answer them directly. The leader we appointed was, on paper, no stronger than either of his predecessors. He is now in his fourth year.
Not every departure is structural
Not every late departure is the organisation’s fault.
Some people are better at arriving than at staying. They are impressive in assessment and in the first six months, and then the novelty goes and so does the energy. That pattern is real and has nothing to do with culture.
And some leaders mistake resistance for dysfunction. Not all friction is a closed culture. Sometimes it is an organisation with good reasons for doing things its way, explained badly. A leader who cannot tell those apart will read every obstacle as proof the place is broken.
So the environment is not always the answer. It is the half nobody examined, which makes it the half most likely to hold one.
What this changes
Two things, neither expensive.
First, before a search, look at the position’s history the way you would look at a candidate’s. Who held it, how long, why they left, what they said on the way out. That costs nothing but the asking.
Second, look at the team the new leader is walking into, not just the seat. If the people around the role do not debate, do not challenge and do not raise problems, the new leader will find that out in their first month and nobody will have told them. That is fixable, but only if the organisation looks before the appointment rather than after the resignation.
That can be measured. Collective Advantage, developed by Matthew Syed Consulting and delivered across the Middle East through ecap advantage, tests whether a team genuinely debates, challenges and makes it safe to raise problems. It is better to know that before asking a new leader to walk into the room.
A board that loses a good leader in the second year often responds by being more careful about candidates next time. That care is right. It is just aimed at half the problem.
Perhaps the candidate was never the variable that needed changing.
Written by Samir Solanki, Partner in Charge at ecap.
Read Daniel Murphy on why track record is one piece of evidence, not the whole case.
