Mastering Executive Transitions

What happens when you finally land that top executive role you've dreamed about—and then discover the real challenge has just begun? In Mastering Executive Transitions, Navid Nazemian offers a compelling and deeply practical guide for leaders navigating the hidden turbulence of moving into or out of senior leadership roles. Drawing from two and a half decades of executive experience across multiple countries and industries, Nazemian argues that the way leaders enter and exit their positions often determines their ultimate success far more than intelligence or technical skill.

Why Transitions Matter More Than Ever

Transition periods are deceptively dangerous. Nazemian shares sobering data: roughly 40 percent of executives fail, are pushed out, or quit within their first 18 months. Despite the high costs of failure—both human and financial—most organizations still invest almost everything in the hiring phase and leave new executives to sink or swim once they start. The imbalance is stark: about 90 percent of hiring costs go to recruitment, while only 10 percent—or less—is devoted to onboarding and integration support. The paradox, he notes, is that leadership transitions are among the most predictable events in corporate life yet remain among the least managed.

In an era of rapid disruption—the so-called “Great Resignation,” accelerated digital transformation, and cascading executive turnovers—transitions have become more frequent and more complex. CEOs are reshuffling management teams faster, and every leadership change creates a domino effect through the organization. Without structured support, even the brightest leaders struggle in a new environment marked by conflicting expectations, complex stakeholders, and unspoken cultural rules.

Beyond the Myth of the Smart Executive

Nazemian challenges a pervasive myth: that smart executives will naturally figure it out. “What got you here won’t get you there,” Marshall Goldsmith once warned, and Nazemian fully agrees. He explains that leadership success in one environment rarely guarantees success in another. Each transition involves learning new cultural codes, political dynamics, and stakeholder networks. Many executives assume autonomy and overconfidence will compensate for lack of structured onboarding—until they collide with misaligned expectations or inherited teams with hidden resistance.

His “triple-lens” perspective—as a corporate leader, HR professional, and executive coach—shows that transitions are not just about surviving the first hundred days. They are about reshaping leadership identity while recharging emotional and mental energy. The challenge is as psychological as it is procedural. Executives often underestimate how draining transitions can be, facing stress levels comparable to divorce or severe illness. Nazemian likens the process to a roller coaster—a thrilling but exhausting ride of euphoria, setbacks, political landmines, and self-doubt.

The Missing Link: Executive Transition Coaching

Unlike traditional leadership development, executive transition coaching is proactive, structured, and time-bound. The goal isn’t just self-awareness but rapid effectiveness. Nazemian distinguishes three roles: leadership development coaches look backward to address behavioral gaps; transition advisers plan short-term strategies for new roles; but executive transition coaches integrate both, focusing on acceleration and longevity. Coaching before day one—so-called “pre-boarding”—is particularly impactful. Starting support early allows executives to understand their context, key stakeholders, and cultural nuances before their first day.

Nazemian shares a case study of “Natalie,” a newly appointed global C-suite leader inheriting a disrupted team and complex matrix organization. Through structured pre-boarding, stakeholder mapping, and leadership team assimilation, she navigated political pitfalls, reset ground rules, and achieved early wins. Her experience illustrates the book’s central promise: when transitions are handled intentionally and with tailored support, productivity doubles and failure risk drops by half.

The Framework to Thrive, Not Just Survive

The heart of the book culminates in Nazemian’s “Double Diamond Framework”—a seven-phase model guiding executives from discovery to mastery. Inspired by design thinking, it acknowledges that transitions are iterative, requiring both divergence (exploring context) and convergence (driving focused execution). The phases—Discover, Immerse, Adapt, Mobilize, Operate, Nourish, and Develop—map the arc from pre-entry preparation to the final legacy one leaves behind. Each stage blends reflection, structured action, and stakeholder engagement, helping executives converge rapidly on high-impact priorities while maintaining personal energy and resilience.

The book also tackles what few guidebooks do: the art of transitioning out. Nazemian argues that the last 90–120 days of an executive’s tenure are just as critical as the first. Departing leaders shape culture and continuity—yet this phase is nearly ignored in management literature. He offers practical questions for self-reflection during one’s final months to ensure a leadership legacy that endures long after departure.

Why This Book Matters

Ultimately, Mastering Executive Transitions is both a cautionary tale and a toolbox. For organizations, it’s a wake-up call to treat onboarding as a strategic investment, not an administrative afterthought. For executives, it’s a roadmap to protecting reputation, well-being, and contribution during the most vulnerable yet transformative career moments. Nazemian’s blend of research, case stories, and empathy positions the book as a definitive modern guide for anyone stepping into a bigger arena of leadership.

Modern leadership transitions, Nazemian explains, are not simple rites of passage. They are complex periods shaped by pace, magnitude of change, and emotional intensity. The science of onboarding provides structured methods to manage these transitions and eliminate the illusion that executives will “figure it out.”

Riding the Emotional Roller Coaster

Executives often begin in a state of euphoria—fresh mandates, welcoming stakeholders, and big visions. Soon, reality introduces competing agendas, unclear mandates, and political undercurrents. Nazemian likens this to a roller coaster where emotional highs quickly give way to destabilizing lows. The metaphor captures the turbulence of simultaneous adjustments: new organizations, new teams, and new expectations. Without deliberate design, leaders end up reacting rather than leading.

Origins of Onboarding Science

Nazemian traces the evolution of onboarding frameworks to seminal works like Michael Watkins’ The First 90 Days (2003) and George Bradt’s New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan (2006). Watkins’ STARS framework—spanning startup, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment, and sustaining success—was revolutionary but generic. It treated transitions as universal 90-day sprints. Bradt’s eight-step plan emphasized milestones and early wins. Yet both models assumed that full onboarding ends within three to four months.

McKinsey research changed that assumption. Studies of over a thousand C-suite executives revealed that transition processes often last twelve to eighteen months—far longer than typical onboarding covers. Even top performers need extensive time to align culture, stakeholder expectations, and strategy. Thus, onboarding is not a single event but an extended adaptation cycle.

Phases Beyond the First 100 Days

Rudi Kindts, former CHRO of British American Tobacco, underscores that onboarding is a continuum of “arrival, survival, and thriving.” Early orientation may help executives arrive—but survival hinges on reading the unspoken cultural codes and letting go of comfort zones. Only then does thriving become possible. Nazemian incorporates this nonlinear reality into his own practice. “You could arrive on one aspect and still be surviving on another,” Kindts says. This insight reframes transitions as adaptive marathons rather than sequential checklists.

Beyond Onboarding: Integration and Pre-boarding

The book also explores Michael Burroughs’ idea of pre-boarding—preparing leaders before they join. His six-stage process begins before day one with interviews, documentation, kick-off, and follow-up, all overseen by a transition consultant. This preemptive preparation counters costly “blind entries,” when a leader walks in uninformed. Pre-boarding, Nazemian insists, turns the first day into a continuation—not a beginning—of alignment.

Similarly, Egon Zehnder and Genesis Advisers identify three maturity levels of onboarding: basic orientation, active assimilation, and accelerated integration. Their five tasks—diagnosing business context, taking charge of the team, aligning stakeholders, embracing culture, and shaping strategy—map closely to the practices Nazemian later codifies in his Double Diamond model. Together, these frameworks confirm that structural and emotional intelligence must work in tandem.

Key takeaway: Structured onboarding halves time-to-productivity and halves failure risk—but only when tailored to the individual, supported by coaching, and socially integrated into the culture.

By dissecting these frameworks and their limitations, Nazemian positions onboarding not as logistics but as an art of human transformation—a process of adaptation, empathy, and alignment that determines whether new leaders thrive or derail.

When executives fail, it’s rarely due to lack of intelligence or effort. Nazemian’s analysis of studies from McKinsey, Leadership IQ, and Navalent distills the top ten reasons for failure into a portrait of overlooked emotional and cultural pitfalls—not technical deficits.

Culture, People, and Politics: The Triple Trap

Three overlapping forces drive about 40 percent of transition breakdowns: culture misalignment, people misjudgment, and political misnavigation. Executives stumble when they impose past formulas on new contexts (“What got you here won’t get you there”), misread hidden alliances, or underestimate how organizational history resists new leadership styles. Cultural tone-deafness is especially fatal in the first six months, when every word and meeting sets reputational tone.

Emotional Blind Spots

Low emotional awareness is another cause. Even seasoned leaders struggle to “read the room,” especially in remote or hybrid setups where subtle cues are missing. The emotionally unskilled executive can’t decode tension or enthusiasm, loses influence, and appears tone-deaf. Nazemian cites Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence as still-resonant evidence that empathic accuracy separates adaptive leaders from tacticians. When navigating a board meeting via Zoom tiles, that skill becomes survival-critical.

The Overconfidence Paradox

Executives often fall prey to the belief that their track record guarantees success. Nazemian calls this the “overconfidence paradox”—a trap that delays seeking help and magnifies learning gaps. Without coaching support or humility, leaders ignore early warning signs, overextend, or burn out. The cost is personal: transition stress scores rival life-changing events.

Ten Patterns of Derailment

Nazemian’s meta-analysis identifies ten recurring mistakes: neglecting context, naiveté about trade-offs, retaining obsolete structures, emotional exhaustion, lack of coaching or coachability, low emotional intelligence, fading motivation, incompatible temperament, insufficient technical depth, and blindness to politics. Nearly all fall within soft-skill territory. The irony is that organizations fixate on technical fit while underinvesting in emotional readiness or relational agility.

“The stress levels associated with an executive transition,” writes Nazemian, “are north of the stress people face when going through a divorce or major illness.”

By reframing failure as a human, not technical, phenomenon, he elevates transition mastery from checklist management to emotional craftsmanship. Executives who manage their energy, relationships, and political awareness, he argues, position themselves not merely to survive transitions—but to reinvent themselves through them.

Behind every failed executive hire lies a wake of losses: millions in compensation, billions in market value, and an erosion of trust that ripples through organizations. Nazemian exposes this invisible economy of failure, showing that poor transitions are more than individual setbacks—they are systemic value destroyers.

The Billion-Dollar Cascade

Studies reveal staggering numbers. The Corporate Executive Board found that teams reporting to failed executives perform 15 percent worse and are 20 percent more likely to disengage or quit. PwC estimates that forced CEO turnovers reduce shareholder value by $1.8 billion per incident. For large-cap companies, each failed succession costs roughly $52 million; for smaller firms, $12 million. When failures cascade—CEO, then lieutenants—the real loss is strategic direction and credibility.

Gender and Inclusion Gaps

Nazemian highlights another dimension: gender disparity. Female executives receive less transition support, fewer mentors, and slower integration than male peers—a 13–22 percent gap according to DDI research. At a time when boards demand gender parity, this oversight undermines effectiveness and retention. Transition support, he contends, is both a performance and equity issue.

The Reputational Toll

Failure scars reputations, often irrevocably. Executives who burn out or are forced out mid-transition rarely regain equivalent positions. Nazemian recounts a case of an expatriate leader laid off mid-restructure who never reentered corporate life, retiring prematurely before fifty. Failed transitions, he concludes, separate those who learn and adapt from those who stagnate.

Organizational Blind Spots

The tragedy: most companies don’t act until after damage is visible. DDI and Russell Reynolds data show that 90 percent of executive-hiring costs go into recruitment and less than 10 percent into ensuring success after appointment. Nazemian likens it to spending lavishly on a wedding and ignoring the marriage that follows. Leaders get laptops and compliance checklists, not stakeholder strategies or coached integration plans. The result is predictable chaos.

“Organizations are prepared to invest in tiny process improvements worth half a percent in profit margin,” Nazemian notes, “but they neglect the process that can double a leader’s impact and halve risk of derailment.”

For executives and HR leaders alike, this chapter delivers a hard truth: mastering transitions isn’t a luxury—it’s a fiduciary responsibility.

Nazemian maps twelve common transition challenges drawn from research and his coaching practice, dividing them into people-and-culture challenges and business-and-technical ones. Each transition, he insists, combines multiple types—complicating the executive’s adaptation exponentially.

Cultural and Interpersonal Hurdles

Executives first face the new organization challenge: decoding invisible rules of “how work really gets done.” Culture shock isn’t limited to international moves; even shifting divisions can demand relearning norms. Then comes the big promotion challenge—the leap beyond technical comfort zones, often accompanied by impostor syndrome. Leading former peers and managing their expectations introduces emotional complexity and social distance. Add the corporate diplomacy challenge—navigating the political map of influence—and even confident leaders can stumble without mentorship or coaching.

International moves compound the learning curve. Nazemian’s anecdote about the cultural difference between Germans and Swiss—both ordering coffee but with vastly different tones—illustrates that small habits can reveal deep value systems. Misreading them erodes trust quickly. Moving from corporate to startup (or vice versa) flips expectations again: from consensus and process to speed and improvisation. Few executives excel in both languages without guidance.

Business and Technical Shifts

On the business side, Nazemian cites the turnaround and realignment challenges as especially treacherous. Inherited teams in denial require political finesse to confront reality. CEOs like Vodafone’s Hannes Ametsreiter realized that regaining market identity demanded both vision and cultural renewal—“honoring the past while igniting the future.” Other executives face post-merger chaos, cross-functional jumps (e.g., from R&D to general management), or newly created roles without precedent. Each scenario tests adaptability, influence, and humility.

The unifying lesson? Transition difficulty scales with the number of simultaneous challenges. A leader promoted internationally into a business portfolio shift is effectively managing three or more transitions at once. At that point, Nazemian insists, external transition coaching becomes indispensable.

Nazemian’s signature contribution—the Double Diamond Framework©—distills executive transition into seven dynamic phases, symbolizing both expansion and focus. Adapted from design thinking, it acknowledges that successful transitions require alternating between divergent exploration and convergent execution.

Understanding the Two Diamonds

Each diamond represents a cycle: the first is about understanding context and people; the second, about acting and institutionalizing. Executives expand to explore and learn, then converge to decide and implement. Across both, five core variables—the five Cs—anchor success: Context, Culture, Commitment, Circles (of influence), and Confidence. These shape every leadership move from the first meeting to the last decision.

The Seven Phases of DIAMOND

• Discover: Pre-boarding research before day one—understanding business realities, culture, and stakeholder maps.
• Immerse: The first 90–120 days of listening, learning, and establishing credibility.
• Adapt: Assessing inherited teams, renegotiating priorities, and aligning with culture.
• Mobilize: Engaging the organization around a narrative for action and early wins.
• Operate: Converting strategy to execution and measuring steady progress.
• Nourish: Consolidating momentum, showing consistency, and balancing learning with delivery.
• Develop: Reflecting, embedding lessons, and preparing for the next cycle of leadership.

Across all phases, energy management is crucial. Nazemian draws on research from Harvard Business Review’s “Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time,” noting that physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual renewal differentiate resilient leaders from burnt-out ones. Executive transitions, he observes, are “marathons with sprints inside.”

“Would you sign up for a marathon without training?” asks Nazemian. “Yet many executives start new roles with no preparation, only hope.”

By combining structured preparation with energy awareness, the Double Diamond Framework transforms transition from hazard to art—a repeatable process leaders can apply throughout their careers.

The final chapters tackle a neglected stage of leadership: exiting. Nazemian opens with a startling statistic—Google returns 9.3 billion hits on “first 90 days,” but barely 57 million on “last 90 days.” Most executives focus on arrival, ignoring how departures define their legacy. Yet how you leave often speaks louder than how you began.

Finishing Strong

Outgoing leaders face a paradox: once a successor is announced, colleagues disengage, assuming decisions no longer matter. Nazemian quotes Ecolab’s Doug Baker, who advises leaders to “run through the finish line.” The final months should not be passive fade-outs but deliberate transitions where knowledge, momentum, and credibility are handed off cleanly. He prompts reflection with practical questions: What decisions would you make if you had three more years? Which people issues can you resolve to leave a stronger bench?

Protecting Legacy

Smooth exits protect both reputation and corporate stability. Planned departures free successors from firefighting so they can focus on vision. Conversely, “momentum freeze” occurs when an organization stalls waiting for new leadership. Nazemian recounts how suspended initiatives during leadership changes wasted two years of coaching program development, emphasizing that proactive succession planning avoids this paralysis.

Respect Between Predecessor and Successor

He shares Trui Hebbelinck’s story of succeeding a 15-year HR veteran. Hebbelinck balanced respect and reinvention by asking careful questions and acknowledging her predecessor’s contributions while decisively setting new strategic direction. Successful transitions, Nazemian argues, are moments of dual leadership—an art of deference and assertion. Boards and HR departments should formalize this phase just as they do onboarding, ensuring the outgoing leader actively supports, not shadows, the incoming one.

Leaving well, in his view, is the hallmark of executive maturity: the ability to let go without unraveling what one built. It cements legacy not through grand gestures but through thoughtful closure and empowerment of the next generation.