When capable senior people underperform repeatedly, the pattern is usually the system, not the recruiting.
Sometimes. If one senior hire fails, look at the hire. If three do, look at what they walked into.
Capable executives with real track records do not simultaneously lose competence upon joining your company. When the same outcome repeats across different people, the constant is the environment.
Three things, usually.
Authority that does not match the title. They were hired to own something and discover that ownership means recommending, while the decision still happens somewhere else. Good executives leave over this faster than they leave over money.
Context that lives in one head. The information required to decide well is in the owner's judgment rather than in the business. So the new person either decides badly with what they have, or comes to ask, which trains everyone that decisions still route to the owner.
A standard nobody has written down. They can feel that things are being judged against something, and they cannot see what it is. So they aim at the owner's reaction instead of at the standard, which is how senior people become expensive approval-seekers.
It looks like a talent problem, because that is genuinely what it feels like.
You hired someone strong. They started well. Six months later they are waiting on you, escalating things you thought they owned, and producing work that is fine rather than excellent. The obvious conclusion is that you hired wrong again.
The less obvious conclusion is that you built a company where the only person with full authority, full context, and the standard in their head is you. Every senior person you add joins a system optimized around that fact.
Move authority to where the information is, and write down who holds what. Put the context into the business rather than the owner. Make the standard explicit enough that someone can meet it without checking.
Then the same caliber of hire performs differently, because they are operating inside a system that lets them.
The purpose is diagnosis, not performance. We will tell you what we see, including when what you need is not us. If there is a fit, we say so directly. If there is not, we say that too.
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