Between them the ten have appointed several thousand senior people and watched what happened next. Almost nobody else has that view.
"The ones who fail usually failed at the offer stage and nobody noticed for a year." Somebody sold them a job that four people in the room described differently. They walk in solving a problem two of those people don't think exists, and by month nine they've spent all their credit arguing about what the job is.
The ones who work out are almost always the ones who asked the hardest questions before they signed. I've stopped treating a difficult candidate process as a warning sign. If they're not interrogating you, they're not going to interrogate the business either.
Honestly? Whether the chair likes them. I know that's not the answer anyone wants. But I've watched capable people fail because the relationship never took, and mediocre people survive three bad years because it did.
Whether anyone told them the truth about the state of the business. Half the failures I've seen were people who accepted a job based on a picture that wasn't accurate, and then got blamed for not fixing something they were never warned about.
Pace. Not intelligence, not track record. The ones who fail are usually running at the speed of their last company and it's the wrong speed for this one, in either direction. Too fast into a business that needed steadying, too slow into one that needed catching up.
The first ninety days tell you, and almost nobody uses them properly. The ones who succeed spend that time listening and the ones who don't spend it announcing. You can predict a great deal from what they did in week three.
They can hold two things at once: what the business needs now and what it needs in three years. Most people are good at one. The ones who only do the second are the expensive ones: everything looks visionary and nothing gets shipped.
Support. It's boring but it's true. Nobody succeeds in a role where the person above them has quietly decided they were the wrong hire in month two and has stopped defending them internally.
In interim it's obvious within a fortnight, which is useful. The ones who work are the ones who arrive with no interest in being liked. The ones who fail spend the first month building relationships and the second month discovering they have no mandate.
I'd say it's whether the job they were hired for still exists six months later. This sector moves. A brilliant appointment against a brief that has stopped being true is still a failure, and it isn't the executive's fault.
Seven of the ten located failure outside the individual: in the brief, the sponsor, the support, or a business that changed shape underneath the appointment. Only three put it primarily on the person hired. That is a striking distribution from an industry whose fees are paid to identify individuals.
The agreement is less uniform than the count suggests. Three of the seven pointed at the offer stage and the brief; two at the sponsor's continued backing; two at the business moving faster than the mandate. Same conclusion, three different mechanisms, and each implies a different remedy.
The three who located it in the individual did not agree either. One named pace, one named the ability to hold near and far horizons together, one named a willingness to be disliked. Nobody named intelligence, and nobody named track record, which is notable, given how much of a shortlist is built from both.
The same question, answered in writing by each of the Twenty.
Cultural mismatch, nine times in ten. The skills question is settled before the final interview.
Whether the business has ever successfully absorbed an outsider before. Some never have.
Clarity of mandate. If you can’t write the first six months down in a paragraph, the appointment is a coin toss.
The ones who last are curious about the parts of the business that aren’t theirs.
Money, more often than anyone admits. Someone who took the job mainly for the package rarely survives the first difficult quarter.
Whether their predecessor is still in the building in some form. That single fact predicts more than anything on a CV.
Stamina. The job is longer than the honeymoon.
Whether anyone develops them after arrival. We buy leaders finished and are surprised they aren’t.
The data says tenure of the hiring manager. Nobody wants that answer, so nobody uses it.
Whether the chair and chief executive agreed on the job before the search began. Most of my failures trace to that gap.
Whether they can read a room in a culture that is not theirs. Everything else can be taught faster.
Whether they have seen the next stage before. Scale-ups fail leaders by asking them to imagine what others have lived.
Weather. Whether they have led through any. A career of fair winds tells you nothing.
Whether they still shop. Leaders who stop being customers stop being right.
The spouse. Nobody puts it in the methodology, and it decides more relocations than money does.
Calm. The failures I have seen were rarely wrong, mostly loud at the wrong moment.
Whether they understand the numbers or merely receive them. It shows within one bad month.
Whether they can ship. Digital is full of leaders fluent in everything but delivery.
Whether they can carry an institution’s memory without being owned by it.
Who they hire in their first ninety days. Leaders reproduce themselves; the good ones do it on purpose.