Perspectives on leadership, transformation and human capital.

Every year, South African enterprises invest heavily to de-risk executive succession. A comprehensive C-suite assessment battery, competency matrices, behavioural interviews, simulated case studies, typically costs between R35,000 and R50,000 per candidate, based on local industry averages. Across a succession pipeline of ten potential leaders, the institutional spend reaches a floor of R350,000 and frequently runs higher.

On paper, this is airtight risk mitigation. The board receives a quantified report confirming that a candidate holds the precise functional skills and strategic competencies required to run the business as it operates today.

Yet the outcomes rarely match the spend.

Data from DDI's Global Leadership Forecast indicates that 35% of internally promoted executives fall short of performance expectations, a figure that rises to 47% for external hires. That risk profile aligns with longitudinal research from McKinsey & Company, which finds that between one-third and one-half of new CEOs are considered to be failing within 18 months of taking office.

In most corporate functions, a failure rate of this magnitude would trigger an immediate review. In succession planning, it is quietly absorbed as a cost of doing business.

And it is seldom a question of calibre. No executive reaches the top tier of corporate South Africa without an exceptional capacity to perform under pressure. These failures are driven by other forces, cultural misalignment, weak stakeholder buy-in, a mishandled first six months. But one driver is consistently under-weighted at the point of selection: the assessment is built to measure fit for the role as it exists now, not the leader's capacity to adapt as that role shifts beneath them.

What the Assessment Measures Well

Most executive vetting answers one question with real precision: can this person run the business as it is currently designed? Candidates are benchmarked against fixed competency frameworks, operational execution, risk management, financial acumen, calibrated for stable conditions.

The difficulty is that the conditions are no longer stable. Between accelerating AI adoption, volatile emerging markets, and rapid shifts in consumer behaviour, the useful lifespan of a corporate strategy has compressed from years to quarters. When a board selects a successor primarily on their mastery of the current operating model, it is, in part, hiring for a version of the business that is already disappearing.

What the Evidence on Skills Actually Says

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 is instructive here, with one honest caveat: it describes the global workforce broadly, not executives specifically.

Analytical thinking remains the single most sought-after core skill employers name. What is notable is what now sits directly beside it: resilience, flexibility, and agility, followed by leadership, creative thinking, and curiosity. Technical competencies, AI, big data, cybersecurity, are, in turn, the fastest-growing skill requirements of all.

The signal is not that expertise has stopped mattering; it plainly has not. It is that adaptability has risen to sit alongside functional mastery as a core requirement rather than a desirable extra. Applied to succession, the implication is direct. An executive can be a genuine master of restructuring or supply-chain optimisation, but if that mastery is hardwired to a legacy operating model, it becomes an anchor the moment the sector is redrawn. The risk is not a deficit of calibre. It is strategic inertia.

A Weighting Problem, Not a Missing Metric

It would be convenient to argue that the industry simply fails to measure adaptability. It does not. Learning agility has been a recognised, commercially assessed construct in executive selection for over two decades.

The problem is one of weighting. Boards continue to over-index on the polished track record, the proven history of wins reads as the safe appointment, and treat adaptability as a tiebreaker rather than a primary criterion. The objective is not to introduce a new metric. It is to stop allowing a strong historical record to stand in for the whole picture, and to give adaptability the weight the failure data demands.

Three Questions Worth Weighting More Heavily

When a board reviews a succession shortlist, three questions separate the leader who can run today's model from the one who can rebuild it.

First, how readily does this leader relinquish what is working? When the market signals a genuine shift, can they dismantle a strategy they built and championed, or do they defend it past its usefulness?

Second, can they decide from fragmented, unfamiliar information? Can they synthesise incomplete signals, an emerging technology risk, an unexpected competitor move, into an operational decision, rather than waiting for clean data that never arrives?

Third, do they actively acquire new domains? Are they still building genuinely unfamiliar expertise, or relying on a fixed catalogue of past successes?

Re-Weighting the Succession Lens

None of this argues for discarding competency assessment. It works for what it measures, and what it measures still matters. The argument is narrower and more demanding: stop letting a strong track record stand in for the entire case.

If you want to de-risk executive succession in earnest, examine how your assessment spend is distributed. Where the selection matrix heavily favours historical execution over the capacity to adapt, you are buying insurance for a market that may not exist in two years.

Rebalance the equation to give agility its proper strategic weight, and you stop selecting for past stability. You begin building a pipeline equipped for conditions you cannot fully forecast, leaders qualified to run the company today, and capable of transforming it tomorrow.