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Beyond Onboarding:

Guiding Senior Executives to Effectively Take Charge in New Leadership Roles


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Based in Naples, Florida, Wiznami® is a network of seasoned, experienced executive coaches and consultants who specialize in facilitating the successful transitions of senior executives into new roles. Our clients are typically CEOs, other members of the C-suite, senior general managers, and senior functional heads and their direct teams or extended teams. What these roles have in common is the legitimate authority and discretionary decision-making to initiate and implement significant changes in their organization with the intent to improve its overall sustainable performance. What the incumbents often lack is the change management expertise to successfully lead these changes.

A Predictable, Iterative Learning Process That Can Be Accelerated

These senior executives, new to their job, often discover after four to six months of attempting to improve the business's performance that the resistance to change is stronger, more pervasive, more insidious, and involves a broader and deeper array of stakeholders than they first imagined.

Beyond the First 90 to 100 Days to Achieving Sustainable Performance Improvements and Business Results

Our coaching and consulting services guide these executives through and beyond the first 90 or first 100 days. Much more effective than the typical executive onboarding processes, these services enable the executive to iteratively diagnose the underlying problems preventing the improved performance of the business and lead the complex change processes that will result in the desired business results.  These services are described in more details as the components of the Three Waves of Change® processes and methodology. Our client testimonials and case studies describe variations on how the Three Waves of Change℠ coaching and consulting processes, tools, and services can be adapted to each client's needs and unique situation.


Senior executive transition failure rate

The Research and Opinions Behind the 40+% Senior Executive Transition Failure Benchmark


"40%" has served as a good relative benchmark for the past fifteen or more years and was originally based on a Center for Creative Leadership study (as cited by Anne Fisher in “Don’t Blow Your New Job” in Fortune, June 22, 1998). Other reported research or survey findings vary significantly by data collection methodology, sampling methodology (or lack thereof), the definition of "failure," the content of the samples of executives, or whether the estimate is simply based on accumulated experience of the report’s author without any supporting data.  Regardless, other sources report similar findings: Right Management Consultants (35%); Leadership IQ (46%), and the Institute of Executive Development (30% external hires, 21% internal transfers, with 34% of new executives gone from the organization within two years).

Center for Creative Leadership author Douglas Riddle proposes¹ that the statistics about failure or inadequate success experienced by executives in new leadership positions are well known by now. He suggests estimates of outright failure in the first 18 months range from 38% to over 50%, and many more executives fail to be as successful as was predicted in the hiring or promotion phase.

These diverse findings are best summarized as approximately 40% of the executives failing to achieve their performance expectations in the first 18 to 24 months in their new executive role. The benchmark failure rate specific to the senior executives who are typically clients of the Three Waves of Change® services is not well known as the research or empirical evidence is limited and companies are understandably private about otherwise highly visible and embarrassing failures.


Footnotes:

1. Douglas Riddle. "Executive Integration: Equipping Transitioning Leaders for Success," Center for Creative Leadership, 2009)
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Wiznami Corp. is an a senior executive coaching service based in Naples, Florida.