People do not change: They adapt. But first they have to see.
When a leader struggles in a bigger role, the usual story is that they are not up to it. That is usually the wrong story. And it tends to produce the wrong response.
There is a moment, four or five months into a bigger role, when the people around a leader start to see them differently.
Nothing has gone badly wrong at this point, but a few decisions have landed poorly. Two or three relationships have cooled, without anyone quite saying, or perhaps even fully understanding, why. The person who came across so clearly in the interview is harder to see.
And, somewhere in the background, the conversation shifts from she is finding her feet to we may have got this one wrong.
The explanation is usually about the person. Something like: They lack gravitas. They have not stepped up. They were excellent one level down, but have now found their ceiling.
Sometimes that may be true.
But more often, something much less dramatic has happened, and something much more fixable: the leader simply cannot clearly see the new room they are standing in.
That sounds like a metaphor, but it isn’t entirely. New leaders really do have to enter a different room: a different set of relationships, expectations, power dynamics and rules.
Think about what a leader four months into a bigger role does not know, and cannot easily find out.
They do not know what their sponsor actually judges them on, as distinct from what the role description says. Those two things are rarely the same. The written version was usually drafted by someone in HR, some time ago, for a different purpose.
The new leader may not know which of their peers was also a candidate for the job. So they may not understand why the relationship with one colleague is particularly difficult, or why that colleague is being helpful in a way that costs them nothing and never quite delivers.
They may not know which decisions are really theirs to make and which ones have already been made elsewhere. They may not know where the informal power sits. They may not yet understand which conversations happen in the room, and which happen afterwards.
None of this is particularly mysterious to people who have been in the organisation for years. But it is almost invisible to the person who has just arrived.
Now look at what an organisation typically does when it notices someone struggling in these conditions.
It offers “leadership development”.
A 360 is run, feedback is collected and averaged, a development plan is written with two or three areas for growth, and finally some training course is found.
Every step is aimed at improving the person.
Very little is aimed at helping the person understand the new environment they are now operating in.
They are still working from an accurate map of a place they are no longer in.
This is why we say people do not change.
It is not a claim that people cannot change. It is an observation about how change tends to happen. We built Luminum Partners around that idea.
The leader in this situation does not need to become someone else. In fact, trying too hard to become someone else is often what produces that slightly hollow version of a leader that everyone recognises from a leadership programme and nobody trusts.
Someone who is playing a part rather than leading as themselves.
What new leaders need is to see the room more accurately.
Then they can adapt what they already have — their judgement, their personality, their strengths, their experience — to a context they can finally make sense of.
The organisational version of this argument is simpler, and probably more persuasive to the managers who appointed the new leader in the first place.
McKinsey has compiled estimates suggesting that between 27 and 46 percent of executive transitions are regarded as failures or disappointments two years on. Of those that do not succeed, 68 percent do so because of politics, culture and people, rather than strategy or technical capability.1
Behind those numbers are real costs: money and opportunity for the organisation, but also considerable personal strain for the leader and uncertainty for the teams they are supposed to lead.
This is what we work on.
Mostly, we sit with someone, week after week, looking at the rooms they are navigating. We shed light into different corners — onto different people, roles and dynamics — until, slowly, the room becomes something they can see.
And at that point, they can become the leader they were always capable of being.
