Nobody Trains You for the Top

We develop leaders all the way up the ladder, then go quiet the moment they reach it.

Think about how much preparation goes into a leader before they ever reach the top. 

The graduate scheme. 

The first management course. 

The stretch assignment, the secondment, the MBA the company part-funded, the leadership programme with the five-figure invoice. 

Years of deliberate investment in getting someone ready.

Then they get the job. And it stops.

We treat the appointment as a kind of graduation. The development budget that followed a person all the way up the organisation does not follow them into the top office. The assumption, rarely said out loud, is that anyone good enough to be appointed must already know how to do it. They have arrived. The learning is over.

It is the wrong assumption, at the worst possible moment. The job they have just been handed is unlike any job that prepared them for it.

The one role with no manual

Every role on the way up has scaffolding around it. A job description. A manager who has done the role before and can show you how. Peers in the same job to compare notes with. A template that you can almost “copy”.

The top job has none of that.

There is one of you. 

Your peers run other companies, not this one. 

The person who held the role before you has gone, often because it was not working. The board governs you but cannot coach you. And the skills that earned you the seat, the functional excellence, the gift for running a great team, are not the skills the seat actually demands. Judgement under real ambiguity. Holding the whole thing together while every part pulls at you. Being the final answer when there is no one above you to escalate to. Carrying a board, a set of investors and a workforce at the same time, on the same morning.

Sounds exhausting right? Almost impossible, at the very least - overwhelming.

Nobody teaches you on the way up. You are expected to absorb it, in real time, in public, while the results are counted every quarter.

The pinnacle of building the plane whilst flying it!

In twenty-five years of placing senior leaders into retail and consumer businesses, I see the pattern most sharply in this sector, because the trading calendar gives a new leader no quiet quarter to find their feet. 

The numbers bear it out. 

Studies of executive transitions repeatedly put the failure rate of senior leaders in a new role at around two in five within the first eighteen months. These are not weak appointments. They are capable people, rigorously assessed through several rounds and by a multitude of people and stakeholders, then handed the hardest job of their careers and then left to work it out on their own.

The quiet derailment

I placed a divisional managing director into a group chief executive role at a multi-fascia retailer. An outstanding operator. He had run the largest part of the business brilliantly for a decade, and the board promoted him with complete confidence. So did I.

Nine months in, the business was fine. He was not.

Nothing dramatic. He had simply never had to do the things the top job demands and the divisional job never did. Allocating capital across businesses he did not know intimately. 

Managing a chair. 

Standing in front of investors and being the story rather than supporting it. Making the call with nobody to check it against first. He was learning all of it live, alone, and the strain showed in slower decisions and a creeping caution that was not really him.

What turned it around was not a training course. It was a coach from that point on, and a small group of chief executives from other sectors who met every few weeks. People who had sat exactly where he was sitting. Suddenly he had somewhere to take the unfamiliar decisions before he made them, and somewhere to learn the parts of the role nobody had ever taught him.

He is still in the seat, and the business has grown into him. The talent was never the question. The support was simply missing, and for the first nine months nobody thought to provide it.

Why we let it happen

If the gap is this obvious, why is it so common?

Partly cost. The development budget goes to the many: the high-potential programmes and the emerging-leader cohorts, where the headcount is large and the return is easy to show on a slide. The person at the top is a single line, and somehow the hardest job in the business attracts the least investment in the person doing it.

Partly pride. By the time someone reaches the top, asking for help can feel like admitting they should not be there. So they do not ask. And the organisation reads the silence as competence.

And partly a simple category error. We confuse being appointed with being ready. The first is a decision a board makes in an afternoon. The second takes the better part of a year, and only happens if someone chooses to invest in it.

What the best organisations do differently

The leaders who grow fastest in the role are rarely the ones who arrived knowing everything. They are the ones who were never expected to.

The organisations that understand this treat the appointment as the start of a development relationship, not the close of one. Real onboarding for the top job, well beyond the laptop and the parking space. A coach from the first week rather than the first crisis. A peer group outside the business, where a leader can learn the unfamiliar parts of the role from people who have already learned them. A chair who counts developing the chief executive as part of the job, not as evidence the appointment was a mistake.

None of this is remedial. It is the opposite. It is what a serious organisation does for its most important and most exposed appointment, deliberately, from day one.

Five questions for any board

If you have recently appointed a senior leader, or you are about to, these are worth an honest answer.

• When we last appointed a leader, what did we actually give them after the offer letter? If the honest answer is a handover and good luck, there is the gap.

  
  

• Who owns that person's development now they are at the top? If nobody owns it, nobody is doing it.

  
  

• Does our leader have anyone outside the business whose only job is to help them think and grow? Not govern them, not report to them. Help them.

  
  

• Do we treat a request for coaching as a strength or a weakness? Your answer decides whether you will ever hear the request.

  
  

• If the role genuinely is unlike anything that came before it, why do we assume no new learning is required?

Closing thought

We invest in people at every rung of the ladder, then go strangely quiet at the top, as though the view from up there explains itself. It does not. The top job is the one that most deserves continued investment, and the one that receives the least.

Nobody trains you for the top.

The best organisations have quietly started to. The rest are still calling the appointment a finish line, and then wondering why so many good people stumble just after they arrive.

I would be very interested to read your thoughts, in the comments or in a direct message. What did your organisation give you, if anything, once you reached the top?

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Maarten Jonckers is the Managing Director of Nicholas Alexander Executive Search, a boutique firm specialising in senior leadership appointments across retail and consumer. He also facilitates peer-advisory boards for business owners through The Alternative Board.