McKinsey has been studying why transformation efforts fail for decades. The number hasn’t moved much: roughly 70% of them stall, collapse, or quietly get absorbed back into the way things were.
The easy explanation is the strategy. Wrong timing. Execution gaps. Market shifted. The consultants overpromised.
McKinsey’s actual finding is less comfortable. The root cause is usually the people running the transformation — specifically, senior leaders who can’t detect resistance, who misread silence as alignment, or who file valid concerns under “people resist change” and move on. When the leaders can’t read the room, the initiative doesn’t die in a dramatic moment. It just quietly bleeds out.
Most CEOs I work with would say their teams are aligned. And most of them are right — in the room. The problem is what happens after the room. The leader who walks out thinking “everyone’s on board” while three of his direct reports are already working around the new initiative. The VP who hears pushback and experiences it as threat rather than information. The culture that has taught people that surfacing problems is riskier than watching them develop.
Patrick Lencioni would call this a trust problem, and he’d be right. Leaders who can’t tolerate uncertainty in themselves can’t detect it in others. When vulnerability is off the table, the room doesn’t go silent because people agree — it goes silent because people have learned that disagreement doesn’t land well. You’ve trained your team to be unreadable, and you’ve called that alignment.
The diagnostic question isn’t “is my team bought in?” It’s: when this initiative hits its first real obstacle, what actually happens in the room?
Here’s what makes that question hard to answer honestly. Your board sees the polished version. Your leadership team sees the version of you that already knows where it’s going. The people around you have something at stake in the relationship, which means their feedback has a thumb on the scale.
The value of a peer group — a real one, not a networking group — is that you get none of those filters. You’re in a room with other CEOs who have nothing to gain from telling you what you want to hear. And at some point, they’ll push back on something you’re sure about.
How you respond in that moment is exactly the tell McKinsey is measuring.
If you want to talk about what that looks like in practice, let’s connect.