The business world does not have a great track record of managing leadership transitions: around 40 percent of new CEOs fail. Derailment rates are similarly high for other senior leadership roles. As my co-authors and I show in “Onboarding isn’t enough,” featured in the Harvard Business Review of May-June 2017, business organizations vary greatly in how much they invest in integrating new executives—with many of them adopting a “sink or swim” approach.

Why have we failed to invest sufficiently in supporting senior leaders to take on new roles?

One could argue that the increasing turnover of business executives has taken us by surprise. A generation ago, an executive typically worked for fewer than three employers in his or her lifetime; by now that figure has probably doubled. Only recently have corporate human resources departments begun to adapt to greater job hopping and more frequent executive shuffles—and even so, the support they offer to incoming executives is typically limited to onboarding, rather than true integration.

I believe there is a deeper root cause for the problem, however. In general, we moderns lack an appreciation of the transitions we go through in our lives, and how important it is to prepare for and manage them. This applies just as much to our careers as it does to our personal lives. We may be able to talk about moving into adolescence or going through a midlife crisis—but that does not translate into a conscious understanding of these critical life passages. Few schools and universities teach children about life transitions and how to make meaning from them.  

As a result, most of us operate under a mechanistic assumption about adulthood. We see our human development as analogous to an industrial production process where an item gets “finished” and is ready for “use.” We have lost the notion of continuous, uninterrupted development (or “unfolding”) throughout our lifetimes. This has far-reaching implications for how we understand our lives and interpret who we are. Many of us move through life without having truly completed critical transitions—such as losing a parent or dealing with a major career disappointment—and so carry with us aborted transition points.

In my work, I see this playing out every day in the business world. Companies have become highly skilled at assessing and selecting executives for leadership roles—but collectively we have invested very little in appreciating the journey that a newly appointed senior leader executive will need to undertake to perform effectively in their new position. We have much to do still in understanding how executives internalize their leadership identities in new roles—how they see and define themselves as leaders, the extent to which this changes as they assume the most senior roles, and how they seize opportunities to behave accordingly.

In building that understanding, we need to consider the unfinished transitions the executives are bringing to the new role. As executives step up to more senior roles—and manage much larger groups of people—it’s essential that they accept greater dependence on others. They must also embrace the need to create alliances and networks for the benefit of the business, even if some leaders are tempted to dismiss this as “political.” If they fail to fully grasp this in their first senior role, in their next role they will be at serious risk of derailment.

We want our leaders to be heroes as they assume big roles at the helms of corporations and other major organizations. We want to believe they are ready for every big change. I am advocating that we temper that expectation in a subtle but important way. Yes, we can celebrate leaders’ talent and ability to perform successfully in a new role. But we must distinguish this from the natural process of disorientation and reorientation, which marks every life transition. Only by acknowledging the depth and complexity of this turning point will we be able to support leaders in successfully integrating into their new roles—and continuing to develop.  

The appointment of a leader to a new role—whether they are promoted from within or hired from outside—presents both a need to examine and internalize the transition as well as an opportunity to grow. By better understanding such transitions, and deriving meaning from them, we can accelerate the integration of newly appointed leaders into their roles.