HPR Blog

When Human Performance Revolution (HPRev) was founded, we set out to help organizations with a business challenge that we saw all too frequently over the course of our careers: why do talented, carefully selected leaders so often struggle, or fail outright, when they step into a new role? The answer, which decades of organizational research confirm, is this: most leadership transitions fail not because the wrong person was chosen. They fail because the transition itself was n

The New Leadership Reality is that Leadership used to be physical. You could walk the floor. Read the room. Sense when things were off. Those watercooler chats about the weekend sports games or your 6-year old’s dance competition built something that created connection, trust and you got to know a person instead of a role. Now? Your team is split between Remote, In-office and Hybrid environments. So leadership doesn’t happen in one place anymore.

How good is your organization at onboarding? If you are like 68% of global executives who responded to a 2024 SHRM onboarding survey, it probably isn’t very good. Study after study shows that well-designed, comprehensive, and long-lasting onboarding programs drive employee retention, engagement, and performance for at least the first two years of employment. That means that a bad onboarding experience isn’t just a boring first day or first week. Making a bad, or even lukewarm

What do you do for your new managers in the first few days and weeks of their new role? Is it any different than how you onboard other employees? Even if you have a great new employee onboarding program (see It’s called onboarding, not on-boring) management roles are a bit more complex than individual contributor roles and they need a little more support.

When a new leader is appointed and starts in their new role, the organization often is filled with optimism, but the transition may be managed with assumptions. Most frequently, there is a mix of emotions on the team they are chosen to lead. The success of the new leader can be left to chance or the organization can manage the transition to improve the likelihood of that leader’s success and help that team continue to perform.

Leadership transitions are among the most consequential and underestimated events in organizational life. A new executive is hired. A founder steps aside. A high-performing manager is promoted to lead former peers. Expectations are high. Momentum is assumed. Yet research and experience consistently show that leadership and organizational performance suffer during leadership transitions. The Performance Dip Is Real Michael Watkins, in The First 90 Days (2013), synthesizing dec