Why do so many capable, experienced leaders struggle during transitions—and what can we learn from their lived experiences?
5 Actions Boards Can Take Tomorrow If leadership transitions are predictable, they should be designable.
The answer, drawn from 241 leaders across 74 international schools, is both clear and confronting: leadership transitions don’t fail because leaders lack skill - they fail because expectations, context, and success criteria are unclear.
Here are five high-impact actions boards can implement immediately: 1. Define Success Before Day One Align as a board on what success looks like in the first 90 days, first year, and beyond. Make expectations explicit; not assumed.
The Study: Listening to Leaders in Transition The Leaders in Transition study was designed to capture what we often miss: the lived experience of leaders as they move into new roles. This study utilized a presentative purposive sample and mixed-methods approach which gathered both quantitative data and qualitative insights to ensure both breadth and depth. This is also among the first studies to examine leadership transitions across three leadership levels simultaneously: • • •
2. Co-Create a Transition Success Profile Work with the incoming leader to clarify priorities, key relationships, and early indicators of progress. 3. Design a Structured Onboarding Process Move beyond informal introductions. Establish a transition committee and develop a clear onboarding plan that includes stakeholder mapping, cultural orientation, and governance alignment.
Strategic Leaders (Heads, Directors) Operational Leaders (Principals, Division Heads) Frontline Leaders (Coordinators, Program Leaders)
4. Establish Regular, Protected Checkpoints Schedule intentional check-ins (30, 60, 90 days and beyond) focused on clarity, support, and alignment; not just performance.
Rather than focusing solely on outcomes, the study asked: • • •
What did you expect going into the role? What actually happened? Where were the biggest gaps?
5. Provide Continuous Support - Not Just Early Support
This approach revealed a consistent and compelling pattern; not of leadership failure, but of system misalignment.
Ensure access to coaching (which has the largest ROI factor for positive leadership transitions), feedback, and reflection throughout the first two years - not just the first few months.
What Leaders Experience: Four Global Patterns Across countries, roles, and school contexts, four recurring patterns emerged. 1.
The Expectation Gap Leaders enter new roles with confidence. They have been selected for their experience, track record, and perceived readiness. But very quickly, many leaders encounter ambiguity. As one leader reflected: “I didn’t know what success actually looked like…”. This insight became one of the defining findings of the study: Confidence without clarity is the norm. This insight aligns with Watkins’ (2013) work on leadership transitions, which highlights how early misalignment can derail even highly capable leaders.
2. Invisible Context A second pattern was the presence of what I call invisible context - the cultural, historical, and political dynamics that are not surfaced during recruitment or known about prior to arrival. Leaders described unwritten rules, legacy tensions, and hidden stakeholder expectations just to name some specific examples of context challenges discovered once in the role. As one participant noted: “The real challenges weren’t visible in the hiring process…”. This finding resonates with Schein’s (2010) work on organizational culture, which emphasizes that what is most influential in organizations is often what is least visible.
Bottom line: Supporting the leader is supporting the school.
3. Misaligned Success Criteria Even when expectations are discussed, they are rarely aligned. Transitioning leaders reported uncertainty about who defines success, how success will be measured and over what timeframe. This creates a fundamental risk, particularly in governance-driven environments where boards and leaders may hold different assumptions. Charan, Drotter, and Noel (2011) emphasize that clarity of role and expectations is essential for leadership effectiveness. This study suggests that such clarity is often missing at the very moment it matters most. 4.
Isolation in Decision-Making Despite stepping into positions of authority, many leaders described feeling isolated and unsupported. Leadership transitions often involve high-stakes decisions, limited feedback, and few safe spaces for reflection. Heifetz and Linsky (2002) describe this as the inherent isolation of leadership, particularly during adaptive challenges. Leadership transitions, by their nature, are deeply adaptive.
A Reality Check for Our Industry When these findings are viewed collectively, a clear conclusion emerges: We do not have a leadership problem. We have a transition design problem. The Leadership Transition Gap (Baker, Spring 2026 Issue 43