What Leaders Get Wrong About Joining a New Industry

Senior executives who move across industries are hired for their difference. The track record in another sector, the capability the industry hasn’t developed, the willingness to challenge assumptions that have stopped being questioned. The rationale is usually sound. What organisations consistently underestimate is how long it takes for that difference to become an asset rather than a liability.

Athalie Williams knows this from experience. After 14 years at Accenture spanning financial services, telecommunications, healthcare and industrials across Australia and Southeast Asia, she moved into a senior corporate role at National Australia Bank. From there, she went to BHP, the world’s largest mining and resources company. Then to BT Group (British Telecommunications), one of the UK’s largest employers, navigating a shift from telecommunications provider to technology company. Each move required her to unlearn something. The rhythm of decisions. The dynamics of regulation. The unspoken logic of how organisations in a given sector measure success. “Every time you change industry, there is a period where the experience that got you hired is not yet working for you, because the context that made it valuable is no longer there,” she says. “The leaders who struggle most are the ones who do not recognise that period is happening.”

The Hire and the Gap

The premise of a cross-sector hire is that the incoming executive brings something the organisation lacks. An external perspective. A capability the sector has not developed. A track record that signals what is possible. The rationale is well-founded: boards increasingly recruit from outside to force a break with established thinking and bring in approaches the sector has not tried.

The problem is not the premise. Almost every time an executive transition fails, the failure is a surprise to the executive themselves, their C-suite, their board, and their teams. The story goes like this: they have been high performers with track records of strong results, engaged teams, and deft handling of ever-more-challenging assignments. And then they step into a new context, and the same qualities produce different results.

DDI’s Leadership Transitions Report 2021, drawing on data from more than 15,000 leaders across 1,740 organisations, found that 35% of internally promoted executives are considered failures in their transition period, and that figure rises to 47% for external hires. The cross-sector move compounds those odds further still. The incoming leader must navigate a new organisation and, beyond that, a fundamentally different operating logic.

It is worth saying plainly: even when both the intent and the approach are sound, these transitions do not always run to plan. The responsibility for outcomes is shared. Organisations that hire across sectors carry an obligation to create the conditions that allow incoming leaders to succeed, and leaders who arrive with strong instincts must balance confidence with genuine curiosity about how the new context actually works. When transitions falter, the cause is rarely one or the other. It is usually both.

What the New Sector Does Not Tell You

Williams identifies a common failure mode: the incoming leader who arrives with well-developed instincts, a strong point of view, and an understandable desire to demonstrate early impact. The instincts are real. The point of view is usually valuable. But the desire to move quickly, before the context has been properly understood, is where things go wrong.

“There is a version of sector knowledge that you cannot read in a briefing pack,” she says. “How do decisions actually get made here? Where does power sit in ways that are not on the org chart? What is the relationship between this company and its regulators, and how does that shape what is possible? What have people already tried, and why did it not work? None of that is in the induction programme.”

The assumptions that follow a leader across sector lines tend to cluster in a few predictable areas: the pace at which change is possible, the role of formal authority versus informal influence, the tolerance for risk and disruption, and the relationship between strategy and execution. An approach that worked in a fast-moving consumer business may be poorly calibrated for a capital-intensive infrastructure company. A leader who thrived in a high-growth environment may misread the political complexity of a regulated one.

The First Twelve Months

Williams’ practical counsel for leaders entering a new sector is grounded in discipline rather than deference. The perspective an incoming executive carries is part of why they were hired. The question is when to deploy it, and sequencing matters more than most realise.

“The first twelve months should be weighted toward listening, not toward proving,” she says. “You are building a map of the territory that nobody else can build for you. That means spending time with the people closest to the work, not just the executive team. It means asking questions that sound naive, because the naive questions often surface the assumptions the organisation has stopped examining.”

Cross-industry transitions that succeed tend to separate the understanding of how the new sector actually operates from the operational frameworks the incoming leader has carried across. Applying what worked in the previous context becomes a liability when the sector operates through fundamentally different incentive structures.

Organisations bear responsibility here too. Williams is direct about what she has observed from the other side of the hiring decision: companies that recruit external talent and then give it no room to operate are wasting the investment. So are companies that expect a cross-sector hire to perform at full effectiveness from month three. “You hired someone from outside the industry because you wanted something different,” she says. “You then need to give them the time and context to actually deliver it.”

The value a cross-sector hire brings, a fresh perspective, a different set of assumptions, a track record built in a different kind of organisation, takes time to translate. Leaders who understand that translation is part of the job, and who approach the first year accordingly, tend to be the ones who are still there making a genuine impact in year two. But they need an organisation that understands that too, and is willing to hold the space for it.