Companies are increasingly talking about a shortage of strong executives. Nevertheless, they create a significant part of this deficit themselves. The paradox is that candidates undergo interviews, demonstrate relevant experience, receive high marks in competencies and at the same time do not cope with the role already in the first months of work. According to various estimates, from 30% to 60% of managers do not achieve the expected results in the first 1-2 years after appointment. These are not isolated selection errors and not a matter of the market. This is the systemic gap between how a business assesses leadership potential and what is actually required of an executive in a real management environment.
Where the gap between assessment and reality arises
Contradictions in the role of the leader have always existed: business result, team management, triggering changes, balancing at the junction of functions – all at the same time. The new is not in the contradictions themselves, but in the intensity: the pressure from above grows, the context becomes tougher, and the tasks still conflict with each other – just with a smaller margin of time for buildup.
For example, you need to speed up the result and at the same time save the team (both in quantity and quality – burnout is still one of the main problems in the workplace for 48%); Implement change without losing operational resilience, promote solutions by negotiating with functions that have their own goals and KPIs. It is in these contradictions that the real quality of management is manifested.
However, most assessment systems are still arranged linearly: experience is checked separately, management skills are checked separately, communication style and past achievements are checked separately. As a result, the candidate may look convincing on each of the parameters, but this does not guarantee that he will be able to assemble them into a single management model in real work.
Why traditional approaches no longer work
In practice, we regularly encounter a repetitive scenario: a strong candidate successfully passes the assessment, but does not withstand the load of the role in which it is necessary to act in conditions of uncertainty, limited resources and constant pressure on the result.
The reason is that classical assessment tools answer the question “what a person can do” and how he manifests himself in a stable environment. However, another thing is important for business – how he makes decisions in conditions of uncertainty, when the system does not support, but creates contradictions and requires a choice between competing priorities.
Firstly, the assessment often relies on past experience that was formed in a different environment and is not always transferred to the current complexity of tasks. Second, interviews test confidence and ability to structure responses, but do not answer the question of how a candidate makes decisions under pressure and conflicting priorities. Thirdly, competencies are considered in isolation, although in reality they must work simultaneously and strengthen each other.
In practice, this manifests itself in specific management dilemmas. The manager can demonstrate a strong focus on results, mobilize quickly, maintain a high pace and work effectively in time pressure conditions. He is able to build trust in the team and support people. However, if it is necessary to maintain simultaneously both the result and the stability of the team, restrictions begin to appear: either the result is achieved at the cost of overloading people or due to the personal involvement of the manager in the operational work, or a comfortable atmosphere remains, but the pace decreases and the focus on the result is lost.
A similar gap is observed between functional competence and product thinking. The manager can confidently work with data, demonstrate strong hard skills and make decisions based on metrics, but experience resistance in situations where you need to slow down, clarify the statement of the client’s problem and test the hypothesis through direct user interaction. As a result, decisions are made faster, but not always more accurately, and the product develops around internal ideas, rather than real needs.
An additional problem is that the profile of the role is often described abstractly: companies form the image of a strong leader, but do not capture the real managerial contradictions that he will face in the first months. As a result, the assessment system confirms compliance with the formal profile, but does not check readiness for real work.
Where did the request for “universal leaders” come from
The growth of requirements for managers is often explained by the complication of tasks, but this is not only this, and this is confirmed by research: most companies note that the management environment has become much more complicated in recent years: products are developing faster, teams become cross-functional, decisions are made when there is a lack of data, and the consequences of errors appear faster and stronger.
In such a system, compensation logic no longer works when a strong side overlaps a weak one. The management role becomes end-to-end: solutions quickly appear in the product, in the team and in the business result, and any bias becomes noticeable almost immediately.
This leads to the fact that companies begin to look for “universal managers” who can equally confidently act in different planes – from strategy to operational management.
However, most often this is not a reflection of a real need, but a consequence of the fact that the management task is not formulated specifically enough. Vague expectations lead to the fact that the widest and often contradictory set of requirements is imposed on one person.
However, a “universal leader” is not a new type of leader, but rather a reaction to the complexity of the environment and the mismatch of assessment tools with the reality of managerial work.
It’s not that there are more such people. The very configuration of the work has changed: the feedback cycle has decreased, the coherence of processes has increased, and management decisions have ceased to be local. Under these conditions, previous assessment tools that record individual competencies no longer reflect the real complexity of the role and do not allow to see how the manager copes with the system as a whole.
The shortage of strong executives is largely a consequence of managerial optics. Companies formulate a request for a new reality, but continue to evaluate candidates using tools designed for a more stable and predictable environment.
As long as this gap persists, the cycle will repeat: a strong candidate at the entrance – a mismatch with expectations at the exit. Moreover, each such case enhances the feeling of a shortage in the market.
How to change the approach to evaluating managers
The solution lies not in expanding the requirements for candidates, but in rebuilding the evaluation logic itself. There are several principles that are beginning to show results in practice.
Firstly, it is important to shift the focus from describing experience to analyzing managerial logic: how a person makes decisions, what restrictions he takes into account, how he sets priorities and what compromises he is ready to make for the sake of the result.
Secondly, the assessment should not check individual competencies, but their bundle. The key question is how the candidate acts in a situation where at the same time there is pressure on terms, team resistance and the need for agreements with other functions.
Third, it is critical to model real-world management scenarios. For example, how does a manager act when a business requires acceleration and the team is already working to the limit? He increases pressure, redistributes resources or reassembles priorities?
How does he make a decision when it is necessary to simultaneously hold short-term results and invest in long-term development?
These contradictory situations make it possible to see not the declared management style, but real management principles.
Fourth, it is necessary to assess the potential through dynamics, and not only through the past status. The ability to adapt, rebuild approaches and work with feedback becomes no less important than the accumulated experience.
Finally, it is important for companies to formulate clearly the management task itself: not the ideal profile of the head, but the specific contradictions that he will face in the first 6-12 months of work.
There are still strong executives in the market. However, companies are not always able to recognize them, because they continue to evaluate the wrong parameters that determine efficiency in real work.
As long as leadership potential is measured by individual competencies, and the managerial role itself requires the ability to hold a complex system as a whole, the gap between the assessment and the actual result will remain.
The next step for business is not to look for more “universal” candidates, but to stop evaluating people outside the context of the task. As long as the valuation is divorced from the reality of the role, the deficit will be replicated regardless of the market situation.
By Anna Rusakova, Director of the Center for Corporate Innovation and Product Development, IIDF Accelerator