The 90-Day Verdict

Why New Leaders Fail Before They StartNew data on the consumer sector landed last month.

54 consumer CEOs at publicly listed companies left their roles in 2025.

The highest figure on record.

In percentage terms, the consumer sector had the highest CEO turnover rate of any industry tracked. The leaders who departed also served the shortest average tenure of any sector, at just 6.3 years.

The number that struck me, however, was a different one.

Between a third and half of new executives fail within their first 18 months. That figure has been broadly stable in academic research and Harvard Business Review coverage for over a decade. It holds whether the leader is promoted from within or hired externally.

Which means roughly half of all the retail and consumer CEO transitions making headlines right now will fail. Not because the wrong person was hired, but because something else broke first.

The hiring myth

When a CEO fails, the conventional wisdom is to blame the appointment.

Boards review the search process. The chair questions the diligence. Someone, eventually, says the headhunter got it wrong.

Sometimes that is true.

Most of the time it is not.

In 25 years of placing senior leaders, I have come to recognise the pattern. The candidates who fail and the candidates who succeed are often equally talented. The variable, more often than not, is not the leader.

It is the first 90 days.

Reading between the lines

The data on senior leadership failure is unusually consistent across decades and sources.

Harvard Business Review puts the rate at 35 to 40% of senior hires washing out within 18 months.

Independent reviews of large samples of executive appointments, drawing on tens of thousands of search outcomes, have arrived at the same range. Roughly 40% of executives hired at senior level are pushed out, fail, or quit within 18 months.

McKinsey reports that more than 90% of CEOs who struggled in their first year wished, in hindsight, that they had managed the transition differently.

Ninety per cent!

Almost every leader who failed knew, retrospectively, that the failure was avoidable. They saw it. The board saw it. The organisation saw it.

And yet the same pattern repeats, in retail more than any other sector right now.

Why the first 90 days set the verdict

A new CEO arrives with enormous latitude.

The board has championed them. The executive team is curious. The organisation is, briefly, willing to be led.

And then the clock starts.

Within a few weeks, the executive team has formed a private view on whether the new leader is strong or weak, decisive or hesitant, listening or pretending to listen. That view is shared in unguarded conversations, in pairs in corridors, in the language people use about the new boss when she is not in the room.

By day 60, the verdict has formed.

By day 90, it has hardened.

The CEO may have another year of grace from the board, but the organisation has already decided whether to lean in or wait it out.

That early verdict is rarely overturned. The leaders I have placed who succeeded did so not because they had brilliant first years. They had brilliant first quarters.

What I have seen

I placed a CEO into a mid-market homewares business about six years ago.

Strong candidate. Right sector. Right scale.

Within four months, he had lost the room.

Not because of strategic missteps. Not because of poor numbers. The numbers, in fact, were holding up.

He had made three early decisions that the executive team read as evidence he did not understand the business.

He restructured a buying function he had not yet observed in action. He changed a supplier relationship his predecessor had spent five years building. He told the commercial director, in their first one-to-one, how the sales process should work in a category he had never operated in.

Any of those decisions might have been right.

Made later, with the context of having watched the business breathe for a quarter, they could have been the start of a transformation.

Made in the first 90 days, they were read as arrogance.

He left within 18 months.

His successor, hired into the same role, made exactly the same calls he had wanted to make. By then, the organisation had decided she was the right leader. The decisions landed differently because she had landed differently first.

Where boards quietly fail their CEOs

Boards invest months, sometimes years, in the search.

They invest weeks in the negotiation.

They invest, on average, almost nothing in what happens after the new CEO walks through the door.

Onboarding, for the most senior role in the organisation, is treated as something the new leader will manage themselves. There is no playbook. No structured stakeholder mapping. No agreed definition of success at 30, 60, and 90 days.

The chair may say, take your time, look around, do not rush.

That is the right instinct, but it is not a plan.

And the new CEO, eager to demonstrate value, often does the opposite. They act early to prove they were the right choice, and in proving it, they undermine it.

Five questions before any senior appointment

If your board is preparing to appoint a CEO, or any senior executive, these are the questions worth answering before the contract is signed.

1. What does success look like at day 90, in writing? Not at year one. At day 90. If the board cannot articulate this, neither can the incoming CEO.

   
   

2. Who in the executive team is most likely to undermine this transition, and what are we doing about it? Every senior appointment creates losers. Boards that do not name them in advance will discover them too late.

   
   

3. What are the three early decisions we are quietly hoping the new CEO will make? If these exist, tell them. If they do not exist, agree them before day one.

   
   

4. Who is the new CEO's first call when something goes wrong, that is not us? CEOs need a sounding board outside the boardroom. If they do not have one, the transition is more fragile than it looks.

   
   

5. How will we know, by day 60, if the integration is failing? By the time the numbers move, it is too late. The signals are softer and earlier.

The verdict is the wrong word

I called this piece the 90-day verdict because that is how the organisation experiences it.

But verdict implies fairness.

It implies that the leader is being judged on what they have done, rather than on how the doing has been read.

The truth is harsher. Most new CEOs are judged on signals they did not realise they were sending, in a window that closed before they noticed it was open.

This is not a failure of the leader.

It is a failure of the integration around them.

Boards spend fortunes finding the right person, and then expect the person to find their own way in.

The appointment is easy.

The first 90 days are the test.

───

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.