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<\/p>\nSomewhere in almost every senior CV, there it is. The position that ended after twelve, eighteen or twenty-four months. A restructuring that came sooner than anyone expected. A new owner with a different plan. A culture that looked right in the interviews and felt wrong from month three. A mandate that turned out to be something other than what had been described.<\/p>\n
In our coaching sessions we can usually sense that we are approaching this entry before we reach it on the CV. The posture changes. The explanations get longer. Sometimes there is a prepared story that sounds rehearsed in the wrong way, and sometimes there is visible tension: “That’s what they’ll ask about.”<\/p>\n
That tension deserves an honest look. Because most of what executives believe about short tenures is outdated, and most of what they do about them makes things worse.<\/p>\n
Here is the context almost nobody has in mind during an interview: short tenures at executive level are not an anomaly. They are a structural feature of the senior market.<\/p>\n
Kevin Kelly, then CEO of the global executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles, put the number plainly: 40 per cent of executives hired at senior level are pushed out, fail or quit within 18 months. Data from the Society for Human Resource Management point in the same direction: half of all externally hired senior managers leave the company within the first 18 months.<\/p>\n
And the trend is accelerating at the top. Russell Reynolds’ 2025 CEO report notes that the share of CEOs leaving within 30 to 36 months rose by 79 per cent year on year. Boards are reaching their verdicts ever sooner.<\/p>\n
Read these numbers together and the conclusion is inescapable. If around half of all external senior appointments end early, then the market itself generates short tenures at scale, every year, in every industry. The executive sitting in our coaching room, convinced that a 16-month role has marked them as damaged goods, is statistically in the company of half the senior hiring market.<\/p>\n
Average executive tenure continues to fall, and it is not unusual for every leader to experience a very short tenure at some point in their career. The stigma is simply lagging behind the statistics.<\/p>\n
The research on why senior appointments fail early is remarkably consistent, and it points away from individual inadequacy.<\/p>\n
The best-supported view: failure is usually an interaction effect. An executive’s behavioural patterns under stress, combined with an unclearly defined mandate and stakeholders who are not aligned. In other words, the typical early exit is not the story of an incompetent executive. It is the story of a mandate that was never clearly defined, of stakeholders who wanted different things, and of a person standing between them.<\/p>\n
There is a deeper finding worth knowing. Boris Groysberg’s research at Harvard followed more than a thousand star investment analysts, professionals with individually measurable, publicly ranked performance, as they moved between firms. The stars’ performance dropped after the move, and the decline persisted for years. What looked like individual excellence was to a significant degree embedded excellence: performance interwoven with a specific platform, specific colleagues, internal networks and firm-specific capital that did not travel with the CV.<\/p>\n
This is one of the quietest and at the same time most liberating findings in the entire management literature. It means that success and failure at senior level are always a property of the context too, not only of the person. The executive who succeeded for twelve years at one company and struggled for fifteen months at another has not revealed their “true”, inferior self. They have demonstrated that fit is real, that context matters and that the same abilities perform differently on different platforms.<\/p>\n
Companies know this, by the way. They just apply it asymmetrically: to explain their own failed hires, but not always to interpret the CVs in front of them.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Here is the distinction that changes everything for our clients: a short tenure is only a warning sign if it is unexplained, repeated or poorly presented.<\/p>\n
Read that again, because each of the three words carries a lesson.<\/p>\n
Unexplained. Decision-makers do not fear the short tenure itself. They fear the unknown behind it. An entry that stands on the CV without context invites the worst interpretation, and in the absence of your version, the reader supplies their own. Silence is not neutral. It is a vacuum that fills with doubt.<\/p>\n
Repeated. One short tenure is a data point. Three in a row form a pattern, and patterns legitimately require a different conversation. But the reverse is also true: an executive with twenty years of solid tenures and one 18-month exception also has a pattern, and it is a pattern of stability. The exception does not define the pattern. The pattern contextualises the exception.<\/p>\n
Poorly presented. This is where the greatest damage occurs, and it is entirely self-inflicted. In our experience, executives handle the question badly in three recognisable ways. They over-explain, delivering a five-minute narrative full of organisational politics that nobody asked for and nobody can verify. They assign blame and criticise their former employer, which decision-makers read as a preview of how the candidate will one day talk about them. Or they visibly tense up, and the discomfort communicates more than the words. The interviewer stops evaluating the tenure and starts evaluating the tension.<\/p>\n
What works instead is what we develop with our clients as part of their transition narrative: a calm, factual account in three sentences that acknowledges reality without dwelling on it.<\/p>\n
The first sentence states the context: what you were brought in to do. The second states what changed: the restructuring, the change of ownership, the strategic pivot, the mutual realisation that the fit was not right. The third states what you took away and what you are focusing on now.<\/p>\n
In practice it sounds like this: “I came on board to build the sales organisation for the DACH expansion. Eight months later the company was acquired, and the new owner consolidated the region under existing structures, which removed the mandate. It was a short chapter, but the market entry concept we developed was carried forward, and the experience sharpened what I want to know about ownership stability before I commit.”<\/p>\n
Twenty seconds. No blame, no drama, no apology. And then, crucially: you stop talking. The most common mistake is to keep going beyond the third sentence. A concise answer signals that you have processed the experience. A rambling one signals the opposite.<\/p>\n
Decision-makers assess your ability to deliver results in every position you have held. For all tenures, long and short, emphasise tangible outcomes and concrete figures. Even a fourteen-month role produced something: a documented strategy, a stabilised team, a concluded negotiation, a contained crisis. Name it. A short tenure with a named result reads completely differently from a short tenure that appears on the CV as a gap with a title.<\/p>\n
There is a version of this story that most executives never consider telling, because they are too busy apologising: sometimes the short tenure is evidence of judgement.<\/p>\n
The executive who realised within a year that the promised mandate did not exist, that the values on the website were not the values in the boardroom, or that the owner never intended to fund the agreed strategy, and who then acted on that realisation instead of spending four years managing a creeping disappointment, has demonstrated something the market claims to want. Clear assessment. Decisiveness. The refusal to waste years, their own and the company’s, on a situation that was not going to improve.<\/p>\n
We handle this framing carefully in coaching, because it only works if it is true and delivered without bitterness. But when it is true, it transforms the conversation. The question “Why did you leave so quickly?” becomes an opportunity to demonstrate exactly the situational judgement that, as we wrote in our Grass Brief on the expectations of boards, has become the most important currency in senior recruitment.<\/p>\n
One last observation from our practice. The executives who carry a short tenure well share one trait: they have stopped organising their story around it. In their narrative, the short chapter is exactly that, a chapter, placed within a career arc with direction and momentum. The executives who struggle are those for whom the short tenure has become the centre of gravity, the topic every conversation will supposedly revolve around, the entry they defend inwardly before anyone has attacked it.<\/p>\n
The market takes its cue from you. Treat the short tenure like a wound and you turn the conversation into an investigation. Treat it as a fact, put in context, explained in twenty seconds and closed, and you steer the conversation towards what actually decides senior appointments: what you bring to the next role.<\/p>\n
Half of the senior market has a short tenure somewhere in its history. The difference was never the entry on the CV. It lies in the composure of the person explaining it.<\/p>\n
At Grass & Partner, we accompany executives and senior managers through career transitions, with a particular focus on making experience visible, relevant and valued. Grass & Partner is a member of the focus50plus network, which is committed to integrating and retaining experienced workers in the Swiss labour market. If you or someone in your network is going through a career change, we are here for you. Contact us at https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/our-services\/new-placement\/<\/a><\/p>\n Sources: Heidrick & Struggles (Kevin Kelly) and SHRM data on early departures of externally hired executives within 18 months; Russell Reynolds Associates, CEO Turnover Report 2025; Leadership IQ, aggregated analysis of executive failure rates, 2026; Groysberg et al., Harvard Business School, research on the portability of star performance; WittKieffer, “How to Talk About, and Embrace, Short Stints on Your Resume”, 2026; Emanate Technology, analysis of tenure as a warning sign, 2026; Robert Half survey of hiring managers on tenure concerns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Somewhere in almost every senior CV, there it is. The position that ended after twelve, eighteen or twenty-four months. A restructuring that came sooner than anyone expected. A new owner with a different plan. A culture that looked right in the interviews and felt wrong from month three. A mandate that turned out to be something other than what had been described.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":8429,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","rank_math_title":"","rank_math_description":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-monday-brief"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8438\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}