New CEO? Why a 100-day plan is your fastest route to failure
In a previous post, I wrote about the “Disneyfication” of work, which includes believing leadership is the most critical factor in organisational success. Despite decades of evidence to the contrary, we continue to believe that organisations are rational and predictable and that the “right” leaders can reliably lead them to glory. Academics often call this belief the romantic/heroic(1) leadership theory.
This is most evident in the appointment of a new CEO, whereupon the media will declare that the entire success or failure of the company now rests on this single individual. It’s as if the many thousands of other employees in the company are entirely irrelevant, their roles in the story discounted en masse.
Behind the CEO’s appointment is an implicit assumption that their previous success will produce the same result when transplanted into a new organisation. Context, it seems, is not important. Prior success is assumed to have resulted from the new CEO’s leadership skills when a closer look might point to serendipity, accidental discoveries, unexpected trends or a thousand other factors we conveniently ignore, unwilling to confront the idea that the world is messy and unpredictable.
These assumptions remain unquestioned despite remarkable evidence that they are hopelessly wrong. In 2017, research from the Corporate Executive Board (now part of Gartner) estimated that 50% to 70% of executives fail within the first 18 months in a new role, regardless of whether they were promoted from inside the business or recruited as an external hire(2). This suggests that context trumps the illusion of responsibility for past success.
When the previous leader failed, we blamed the leader, not the system. Strangely, the headhunters who recommended the failed leader are never subjected to fee clawbacks. Rather than shouldering their responsibility for selling the flawed dream, they are given another lucrative assignment to find a replacement. Nobody seems to see the irony.
The failure to consider context is undoubtedly made worse by the ridiculous obsession with new CEOs producing a ‘100-day plan’ as soon as they get their key to the executive bathroom. Boston Consulting Group offers this wonderful advice to new leaders(3):
“In their first 100 days, CEOs should create a multifaceted and integrated narrative that lays out their strategic ambition as well as their transformation, stakeholder management, communications, and talent assessment plans.”
All this in just 100 days, with little context or even industry knowledge in many cases. It’s patently ridiculous and clearly composed by someone who’s never run a company. No wonder the failure rate is so high.
What happens next is entirely predictable. Under heavy expectations, the new leader will bizarrely propose broadly the same solutions as those that ultimately failed their predecessors. Typically, these will take the form of a 100-day plan based on a pick’n’mix bundle of the ‘standard’ responses:
• Define and build a culture of high performance.
• Redefine our purpose.
• Address leadership capability across the business.
• Change our structure to align with our strategy.
• Get our people to live our values.
• Put customers at the heart of everything we do.
• Drive accountability throughout the organisation.
• Change our incentives to drive performance.
• Break down silos to improve collaboration.
• Adopt agile ways of working across the business.
Blah, blah, blah. The same old bullshit every time. It’s all so dull and predictable. You hand over all that money in superstar CEO pay packages and don’t even get one original thought in return. It’s pathetic. It makes me angry.
Each time, an avalanche of well-intentioned but ultimately futile endeavours kicks off, often requiring many new hires in Human Resources and Internal Communications (support functions that exist primarily to generate and propagate nonsense). This results in more ‘stuff’ raining down on already stressed and overburdened middle managers, pulling them away from doing something worthwhile that might improve things for customers and employees. Each time, the longest-serving frontline employees will recall that something very similar was tried before by several other since-departed leaders and made little or no difference.
The interventions regularly fail to deliver the promised outcomes, often creating unforeseen consequences that worsen an already bad situation. Instead of questioning our beliefs about leadership, we look for another explanation for why things didn't quite work out as planned.
It was the culture. It was the communications. It was poor change management. It was the lack of middle management capability, etc. We never question the fundamental belief that leaders can predict and control the future. That would be a massive challenge to our collective belief system, to many leaders’ egos, and to the highly profitable industries that support the cult of leadership, such as headhunters, business schools, leadership institutes, and executive coaches. What would they all do if enough people saw that the emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes?
Here is a contrarian idea. On the appointment of a new CEO, the board should make it clear that - unless there is an unforeseen crisis - there will be no significant organisational changes for six to twelve months until the new CEO has spent enough time to properly understand the current context before developing and testing any hypotheses about the future. Imagine the relief of middle management! They could finally finish and embed some changes and enjoy a period of calm where the organisation could focus on the customer and not on itself. Crazy, I know.
Excerpts from Magnetic Nonsense: A Short History of Bullshit at Work and How to Make it Go Away
Need any help sorting out nonsense in your organisation? www.disruptionspace.co
1. Allison, Scott & Cecilione, Jennifer. (2015). Paradoxical Truths in Heroic Leadership: Implications for Leadership Development and Effectiveness
2. https://www.businessinsider.com/reasons-executives-fail-2015-3
3. https://www.bcg.com/publications/2023/impact-of-ceo-first-100-days