Who Is Responsible for Developing Senior Leaders? Anyone?
Too Often Overlooked in C-Suite Promotions
Expectations rise sharply for executives in senior positions, but organizational commitment to developing senior leaders rarely keeps pace. Very little time, structure, or funding is devoted to the deeper work of learning how to lead people well.
Subject matter expertise, market awareness, and industry experience are usually heavily vetted before someone is offered an executive role. Leadership capacity?
What is their level of personal influence? Are they cut out for cross-functional collaboration? What are their core competencies? For some reason that is rarely assessed. It's all presumed to be there.
In today’s fast‑moving organizations, especially in growth-stage companies, startups, and technical fields, leaders are often promoted quickly based on results, expertise, or vision. The same dynamic shows up in owner-partner professional leadership systems, where leaders are senior by status rather than by any formal development pathway.
In reality, many senior leaders have had surprisingly little exposure to sustained, skillful leadership development. While the mid-managers in their organization might be enrolled in a leadership development program, it's often generic and doesn't focus on their personal traits, habits, or mindset.
The mid-managers probably also benefit from established accountability processes, but for executives, feedback thins out as power increases. Peers become cautious and direct-reports edit themselves. Boards are distant from day‑to‑day behavior. By the time they know there is a problem, it's a really big problem.
HR may take notice, but they rarely have authority or influential leverage over someone that high in the hierarchy.
How exactly are leaders supposed to mature in a developmental vacuum? The executive leadership team doesn't see it as their job to teach. The system assumes maturity emerges according to leadership level. When it doesn't, there is frustration and real costs to the business.
Fast Growth, Thin Development, Bad Outcomes
Modern career paths reward speed. High performers are catapulted into senior executive leadership roles with increasing scope and complexity long before they’ve had much practice managing people, navigating conflict, or receiving honest feedback.
In these environments, bravado and the myth of the self-made-leader drive unearned confidence. Performance outcomes are often linked to strategy and execution, but not to the broader area of leadership effectiveness.
As a co-owner and co-founder who helped grow a counseling agency from $0 to nearly seven-figure revenue over twelve years, I was never not the boss. I asked for feedback from my directors, and I got it. But without guidance from someone skilled enough to provide expert leadership assessment, interpret and apply the results, challenge me through a mindset update, my own development stalled.
We invested deeply in talent development and supporting our staff, yet failed to build in meaningful assessment of leadership skills or accountability for ourselves. We struggled with building a leadership pipeline.
We had a high-performing team, but without deeper feedback and evaluation processes, their development hit a wall and our succession planning failed. I only saw how critical that missing piece was in hindsight, after the partnership and agency dissolved in a fiery mess.
Under conditions like these, executives fall into a trap of isolation. That isolation breeds anxiety, and that dangerous combo leads to poor decision-making, autocratic leadership, and constricted vision. No doubt, without ongoing rigorous reflection, self-awareness, and personal development, senior executives fall head first into the trap of “what got you here, won’t get you there.”
A senior leader who doesn't land well in the first year doesn't just underperform. They shape a team, a culture, sometimes an entire P&L, while they're still finding their footing.
Developing Senior Leaders Continues with Every Promotion
The gap isn't limited to someone's first executive role. It repeats at every promotion after that.
Mid-level leaders usually get a real onboarding: a structured plan, regular manager check-ins, sometimes a formal mentor. Senior leaders get a start date and a title. The higher the role, the more the organization assumes the person will figure it out on their own.
What should development for executives look like?
Secure experienced guides. If the company is large enough to have a dedicated leadership coach who is neutral, objective and expert, this person should oversee development. Most organizations need to contract with a good-fit leadership consultant who can provide effective and valuable assessment, coaching, insight and support.
Know the leader's baseline. Conduct a 360 review as they enter this new role. Be sure to include evaluators who worked closely with them in their previous role.
Provide senior-specific onboarding. This goes way beyond basic employee onboarding. Orient them to stakeholder mapping, existing leadership styles on the senior team, cultural nuances. Consider adding a stakeholder sponsor who is tasked with educating the leader regarding risk, governance, and priorities.
Facilitate structured reflection throughout the first six months. The leadership coach meets regularly with this senior for the express purpose of accelerating their impact. Carving out dedicated sessions provides opportunity for timely consideration, confidential and honest feedback, and dedicated support so that the leader has the opportunity to course-correct early on, before small issues become big problems.
Conduct a second 360 review. After 6 to 8 months of working in their new role, it’s time to reassess. How are they showing up in this group of colleagues? What traits are supporting progress and which are impeding it? Based on those results, the leader should consider the option of extending this focused development phase to further expand their leadership capacity and ensure success in their new role.
It’s Not Too Late—but It Is Urgent
Here’s the hopeful and demanding truth: it’s not too late.
Senior leaders are still capable of growth, insight, and meaningful change. But at this level, development requires something different than internal coaching, ad hoc feedback, or one‑off workshops. These approaches lose efficacy with the internal politics, lack of effective accountability, and higher pressure and complexity at senior levels.
Internal promotion doesn't protect anyone from this gap. Familiarity with the building isn't the same as capability at a higher altitude. The data backs the urgency. DDI's 2021 Leadership Transitions Report, drawing on nearly 16,000 leaders worldwide, found that 35 percent of internally promoted executives and 47 percent of externally hired executives are considered failures in their new roles.
Executive leadership development often requires experienced, external support. A leadership consultant can provide the wisdom, perspective, and position to work skillfully inside power, pressure, and complexity. There is an art to leveraging truth-telling without the constraints of power dynamics or political fallout.
That kind of expertise is rare to find in‑house, not because organizations are negligent, but because it is a specialized discipline in itself.
Why the Leaders Who Need It Most Resist It Hardest
The leaders most willing to bring in a coach, most open to hard feedback, tend to need it least. Some self-awareness is usually what made them curious enough to ask in the first place. This probably explains why so many of these gaps go unaddressed for years.
The leaders who resist hardest, who treat coaching as an admission that something is wrong with them, are often the ones in the most precarious position. Asking for help feels like a risk they can't afford. So they double-down on their ingrained habits believing that is what will propel them forward.
This isn't a character flaw. It's what happens when a system makes unrealistic assumptions about leadership effectiveness, then has to limp along when the person at the top has limited capacity.
Why Leadership Consulting Becomes the Strongest Lever
Executive coaching is part of this discipline. A broader understanding of organizational structures, business realities and team dynamics are also required. This is why leadership consulting so often becomes the best development option for senior leaders.
Not as a soft alternative to accountability, but as a way to finally provide what was missing all along: a structured space for honest reflection, behavioral insight, and sustained development, free from political entanglement, and informed by the real demands of organizational performance and interpersonal tensions.
Handled well, leadership consulting allows organizations to respond to gaps in executive capacity without overreacting or avoiding. And it is a wise move to invest in growth before the senior leader burns out or spins out.
Next Steps for the Organization and the Leader
If we expect senior leaders to know better, we also have to ask whether we've ever truly invested in helping them get there.
The honest answer splits in two. The organization is responsible for building the structure: real onboarding, real 360 feedback at the right intervals, support that continues well past the first ninety days.
The leader is responsible for doing something with it once it exists. Neither side gets to skip their half and blame the other.
Leadership development is not automatic. It is not purely intuitive. And it is not a side project. It requires intention, expertise, and resources, especially when the stakes are high.
If you're facing pressure around a senior leader and want space to slow things down, think out loud, and choose a response that's both responsible and realistic. An experienced executive coach can help you assess what's possible before decisions become irreversible.
Key Takeaways
Leadership capacity is assumed at the executive level. It's rarely assessed or developed the way subject matter expertise is.
The onboarding most companies give mid-managers rarely extends to senior hires or senior promotions.
Internal promotion doesn't reduce the risk. DDI's 2021 research found 35 percent of internally promoted executives are still considered failures.
The leaders most resistant to coaching are often the ones who need it most.
Developing senior leaders is a shared responsibility. The organization builds the structure. The leader does the work inside it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Isn't this just executive coaching with extra steps?
No. Coaching is one piece of it. A senior leader stepping into a new role also needs a real onboarding process, a baseline assessment, and a defined reassessment point, not just a standing coaching appointment.
We already do 360 reviews. Why isn't one enough?
A single 360 tells you where someone starts. Without a second review at six to eight months, you have no way to know whether anything actually changed, only whether the leader says it did.
What if the leader doesn't think they need this?
That reaction is common and worth taking seriously rather than pushing past. Resistance is usually a sign of exactly the exposure this piece describes: little prior feedback, high stakes, and no model for what asking for support at this level is supposed to look like.
Does this apply to internal promotions, or only outside hires?
Both. Internal promotion doesn't protect a leader from this gap. Familiarity with the organization isn't the same as capability at a higher level of responsibility.
How long does this kind of development actually take?
Plan on six to eight months as a working phase, with a reassessment at the end of it to decide whether to extend. It isn't a one-time workshop, and it isn't indefinite either.
