---
title: "40% of Transitions Will Fail"
url: https://stacklist.com/card/c7000e7d-1ec6-46d2-8607-2f2d0d531f22
source_url: "https://www.linkedin.com/posts/carlyvivian_42-of-late-career-executives-are-planning-activity-7446934774516154368-PJlA?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAFrUaX0BkrFcqdmToMFUUOoHg_DGFyswYjY"
stack: https://stacklist.com/c/business/stack/cdcbc56a-3bfd-4127-9260-fe72134b6efc
summary: "A LinkedIn post by Carly Vivian highlights that 40% of executive leadership transitions fail, a figure consistent across major research sources for over a decade. The post argues these failures are clarity failures, not capability failures, and that successful transitions require executives to first decode their own strengths before deciding where to apply them."
tags: "executive-transition, leadership, career-change, self-awareness, organizational-culture, failure-rate, late-career"
key_entities: "Carly Vivian (person), André Porsch (person), McKinsey (organization), Harvard Business Review (organization), Heidrick & Struggles (organization), CEB (organization), BTS (organization), DDI (organization), Gartner (organization), executive transition failure (concept), leadership clarity (concept), self-awareness (concept)"
classification: "snippet"
content_hash: "sha256:d90fd2a98a60477f549ad37284d7bf485f71a2f6655b5d2270bf99f6afe995b7"
acp_version: "0.2"
token_counts_approximate: 626
visibility: public
agent_accessible: true
status: "final"
---

# 40% of Transitions Will Fail

Carly Vivian 3mo Report this post 42% of late-career executives are planning a leadership change in the next three years. 40% of those transitions will fail. That number has held across McKinsey, HBR, Heidrick & Struggles, and CEB for over a decade. (See sources in the comments.) The research points to the same reasons for failure every time: • Walking in without a clear read on what the role actually demanded. • Culture that wasn't visible from the outside. • Strategic complexity nobody fully anticipated. These aren't capability failures. They're clarity failures. And the clarity that was missing wasn't about the new role. It was about themselves. Most people who've built something significant at this level never had to decode what they were running on. The First Act didn't require it. The context provided the conditions - the right problems, the right stakes - and the recipe ran in the background for twenty-plus years without ever needing a name. Then the context disappears. The organization. The daily rhythm of decisions that carried real weight. The structure that made capability visible to the world and to themselves. None of that transfers. The recipe does, but no one ever wrote it down. The executives who come through transitions well aren't the ones with the best forward plan. They're the ones who did the backward work first. They knew what they were bringing before they decided where to bring it. The move is the easy part. Knowing what you're moving with - that's where most transitions lose the odds. 6 4 Comments Like Comment Share Copy LinkedIn Facebook X Carly Vivian 3mo Report this comment The 40% figure has held across independent sources for over a decade. If you're in transition or heading toward one, The Signal is a good place to start decoding what you've built: carlyvivian.com/5questions Like Reply 1 Reaction Carly Vivian 3mo Report this comment Sources behind the data: BTS (2025) - https://bts.com/insights/why-executive-transitions-go-wrong---and-what-to-do-about-it McKinsey - Successfully Transitioning to New Leadership Roles DDI Global Leadership Forecast (2021) HBR/CEB Gartner Like Reply 1 Reaction André Porsch, CISM 3mo Report this comment A lot of senior leaders only see this after the move. What felt like confidence was sometimes context doing part of the work. Once that falls away, what actually travels becomes obvious fast. Like Reply 1 Reaction 2 Reactions See more comments To view or add a comment, sign in