A failed leadership hire is expensive, long before anybody totals it up.

The visible cost is easy enough to talk about. The quieter costs are the ones that interest me. Lost trust. Slower decisions. A team that starts second-guessing itself. Months spent repairing something that was described as a successful hire on the day the offer was signed.

That is the part the search industry is still too comfortable ignoring.

The fee lands when the contract is signed. The shortlist is done. The search moves on. Too rarely does anyone return six or twelve months later and ask a harder question: did this actually work? That is not a flaw at the margins. It is part of the commercial model.

I say that as somebody who spent years inside the profession, not outside taking cheap shots. There are good people in it. But the incentives shape the behaviour. If placement is the moment that gets rewarded, then placement becomes what the system optimises for. Not staying power. Not team effect. Not whether the business was honest about what the role really required.

That is how you end up with a candidate who looks safe on paper and fails in context. Or a candidate who gets ruled out early because they do not speak leadership in the accent a board is used to hearing. The part that frustrates me most is how avoidable much of this is. You can measure more than most processes currently choose to measure. You can look properly at behaviours, cultural drivers, the gap between the brief and the lived environment, and what support will be needed once somebody lands. You can stay with the decision beyond the offer.

Filling the role is not the same as making a good leadership decision. It is only the start of one.

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