Anna took the feedback seriously, she adjusted her approach, but nothing changed. That is when I was brought in. A few stakeholder interviews later, something became clear: Her decisiveness wasn’t the problem. Her company had normalized over-consensus. Speed wasn’t valued; it was treated as recklessness, and urgency as inflexibility. Her decisiveness didn’t create friction.  It exposed it.

Anna’s experience is not unusual. I see this dynamic often across senior leaders I have coached. A leader is told to “show up differently,” “be more strategic,” or “slow down.” When they try to adjust, nothing changes. The feedback stays the same; the narrative stays the same.

The result is predictable. The leader becomes frustrated, while the organization begins to question fit, initiate performance plans, and in many cases, quietly plan a replacement. The more important question is whether the organization is diagnosing the problem correctly.

The Evaluation Trap: A Strategic Risk

Organizations don’t lose great leaders because they are difficult. They lose them because they misdiagnose what makes them difficult. I call this the evaluation trap.

In talent reviews, leaders ask familiar questions: “Why did this leader go from strong to struggling?” or “What do they need to change?” The answers almost always converge in the same place: a behavior that needs to be fixed.

The issue is not a lack of data. It’s how the data is interpreted. Organizations default to what is most visible—behavior—while the context shaping that behavior remains harder to see. This reflects a well-documented bias: we over-attribute outcomes to individuals and underweight the environment around them. Competency models reinforce this pattern. They translate complex leadership dynamics into behavioral language, which is useful but incomplete. Over time, behavior becomes the default lens for all evaluation. If there is friction, the assumption is simple: The leader is the problem.

And when that assumption is wrong, the consequences are significant. Organizations don’t just misunderstand leaders—they make flawed decisions about promotion, development, and retention. The leaders most likely to fall into this trap are not underperformers. They are often the ones the organization depends on most—high-output, highly capable, and frequently described as “brilliant, but….”