I've sat with more than one senior leader who, six to eight months into a new and genuinely hard context, quietly conclude they are failing. Not because any metric or feedback said so.
Often, by every internal measure, they're doing exactly what the role demands. But the business results haven’t turned yet — and in their mind, if they were doing this well, it should have by now.
It's a strange thing to notice, but incredibly common: we tend to equate speed with capability, and results with productivity.
Faster results read as more skilled.
Slower reads as struggling.
That's not a norm, but it's closer to a default human wiring around achievement, the kind most of us absorbed long before we ever sat in any leadership seat.
Do it well, do it fast.
Anything else is subpar or suboptimal.
That logic might hold in some cases.
In most transitions, especially when senior executives carry a mandate for business transformation, turnaround, or technology adoption, "do it fast" comes at a cost to the leader and the organisation.
The conversation that doesn't take place
Conversations in the initial stages mostly revolve around getting the leader familiar and bringing them up to speed.
But in that orientation, the layer that's commonly missing is clearly aligning on expectations and timelines.
When the board, the executive committee, or the sponsor doesn't explicitly define — or have a conversation about — what success looks like and the timeline they expect it in, it stays open to the leader's interpretation, often borrowed from whatever worked in a previous setting.
The system's silence here usually isn't a failure of intent. It often comes from a reasonable place: senior executives are tenured, experienced, presumed to know how to navigate ambiguity.
But tenure and experience don't transfer history, context, or unwritten expectations.
A new organisation, function, or team carries its own ideology, culture, and unwritten rules — no amount of prior seniority hands a leader a fluent read of them on day one. And for an external hire, there is no inherited context to fall back on at all.
Yes, a leader could proactively clarify expectations and timelines. But the human psyche, by default, in unfamiliar territory, leans toward caution, not courage — treading carefully, gauging what can and can't be said, and what a question like that might signal about them.
So when the system doesn't state it, and the leader doesn't ask, both are behaving reasonably, from where they're standing.
But the result is the same either way: expectations and timelines default to prior learning, and that's where false urgency and classification of success begin.
What the research says
Here's what research shows: external hires typically need 6 to 12 months1 to reach full productivity.
But productivity and business results aren't the same thing.
Full productivity means the leader is operating at capacity — decisions, judgment, relationships, all functioning as they should by now.
Results are what happens after that: the lag between a leader doing the right things and the organisation and the market actually registering them.
For a genuine turnaround, that lag runs longer than most timelines account for.
What I've consistently seen among the external hires I've worked with is that it takes closer to 18 months to 2 years for results to become fully visible — even after the leader has long since become productive.
I haven't come across research that names this gap directly — most of what's studied is time to productivity, not time to visible results. But it aligns with what the research establishes.
Which means the deadline a leader is quietly judging themselves against, and perhaps even the system, isn't just unfair; it’s wrong.
Across the external hires I've supported this past year, the same gap keeps showing up: nobody has explicitly clarified the timeline for expectations — by which quarter they want to start seeing results.
Before you set a timeline for a transitioning leader, three things are worth checking:
Has anyone named the difference between productivity and results? A leader can be fully operating at capacity long before the business shows it.
Has the timeline been stated, or assumed? If nobody's said it out loud, it's been borrowed from whatever worked somewhere else, by the system or by the leader.
Whose deadline is this actually? If it can't be traced to a conversation, it's not a deadline. It's a guess being treated as one.
Without that clarity, a transition can look like it's failing when it isn't.
And the cost of that isn't abstract.
A leader gets quietly written off before the real evidence is in. Confidence — theirs, and the system's in them — starts eroding prematurely. And by the time anyone realises the timeline itself was wrong, the leader may already be halfway out the door, or halfway checked out.
The experiences I write about are drawn from pattern recognition — two decades in corporate leadership, my own transition experience, and coaching over 300 leaders across senior transitions and beyond.
If the patterns I write about feel close to home and you'd like an open, unbiased, non-obligatory chat with someone who's sat inside transitions when this exact gap shows up, I'd be happy to talk. Simply reply to this email or book a time here.
1 Research from the Institute for Executive Development and Alexcel Group indicates that the ramp-up time for external hires to reach full productivity is six to nine months— sometimes longer.
