Why Good People Fail in Good Organisations

Early in my career, I was brought in to transform the onboarding and project functions at a fintech. The brief was clear and genuinely exciting: redesign how clients were onboarded, how projects were run, and manage the exit of a number of existing clients who no longer fit the portfolio.

I had a committed, capable team. People who cared about the work and knew it inside out.

We failed to transform anything of significance.

Not because the people weren't good enough. Not because the brief was wrong. Because the environment we were operating in made transformation impossible. Everything ran on fear. Solutions were imposed from above rather than designed by the people who actually understood the processes. When things went wrong - and in transformation work, things always go wrong - people were belittled in public. Accountability existed only for those without power. At the senior level, there was neither alignment nor consequence.

I woke up every morning dreading what the day would bring. That's not a mindset problem. That's a nervous system telling you the truth about the environment you're in.

The team and I were capable. The conditions weren't. And when the conditions aren't right, capability doesn't matter.

I thought about that period recently when a CEO asked me to assess a candidate and tell them whether to hire.

The brief was straightforward enough: run a personality assessment, review the results, give a verdict. In or out. Yes or no.

I had to explain that using a personality assessment to make a hiring decision is illegal. But the legal issue wasn't what activated me. What activated me was the premise underneath the question - that performance is inside the person. Fixed. Discoverable. That the right tool, applied correctly, will reveal whether someone will succeed.

That belief is understandable. It's also, the research now tells us, largely wrong.

Nearly half of all new hires fail within eighteen months. The figure that should stop us in our tracks is this: 89% of those failures have nothing to do with whether the person could do the job. They are attitudinal failures. Cultural failures. Failures of fit between a person, their environment, and the support available to bridge the gap. The interview process and the assessment tool are, between them, largely measuring the 11%.

Performance isn't a trait. It's an outcome. And it depends on three conditions being present simultaneously.

The Person

How well-resourced and self-aware someone is. Their nervous system state. Their understanding of their genuine strengths, not the polished version on the CV, but the ones that are authentically energising and that others consistently experience as a contribution. And their growth edges: the places where those same strengths tip into patterns that limit them under pressure, especially when they're new, uncertain, and trying to prove themselves.

No assessment tool can tell you whether someone will perform. It can surface patterns and tendencies. It can give a hiring manager a useful heads-up. What it cannot do is predict behaviour in a complex, fast-moving environment where conditions keep shifting, which is every environment worth working in.

What it also cannot do is compensate for an organisation that hasn't built the other two conditions.

The Environment

The culture and conditions the person steps into.

David Rock's SCARF model gives us the neuroscience. In their first ninety days, a new hire's brain is running a near-continuous threat-detection scan across five social domains: Status (do I matter here?), Certainty (do I know what's expected of me?), Autonomy (do I have any agency?), Relatedness (do I belong?), and Fairness (is this equitable?). These are not abstract concerns. Each domain draws on the same neural circuits as physical survival. A threat to any one of them - a manager who doesn't acknowledge them, an unclear brief, a team that hasn't made space for them, a culture where accountability flows only downward - triggers a stress response that takes the prefrontal cortex partially offline.

The cognitive capacity you hired for becomes biologically less available. Not because the person isn't trying. Because the environment is running the wrong signal.

I know what all five SCARF threats active simultaneously feels like. I lived it. That fintech was running threat on every domain, every day. We weren't brave enough to transform anything - not because we lacked capability or commitment, but because the environment had made bravery neurobiologically difficult.

The environment is never neutral. It is always either accelerating capacity or inhibiting it, from week one.

The Arc of Support

Not what happens on day one. What is designed across the whole first quarter and therafter.

The feedback rhythms. The coaching conversations. The intentional building of capability as the role reveals itself. The explicit question, asked regularly: what do you need right now that you don't have?

The data here is both compelling and quietly damning. Only 12% of employees say their organisation does a great job of onboarding. Strong onboarding improves retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%. New hires whose managers are highly engaged in the onboarding process are 3.4 times more likely to say it worked. And 1 in 3 new hires leaves within the first 90 days, often having made the decision within the first month.

We are spending significant money on hiring and almost NOTHING on the designed arc that determines whether the hire works. The performance problem most organisations are trying to solve in year two was created in week three.

What the ERA Is Really Asking

From 1st June 2026, everyone you hire begins accumulating full employment rights immediately - effective January 2027. The two-year qualifying window is gone.

Most of the conversation I hear is about compliance. Contracts. Exposure. I understand the concern.

But the leaders I find most interesting are asking a different question: how do we build onboarding that is genuinely best in class? Not because the law requires it, but because getting a person embedded, delivering value, and thriving quickly is simply good business. A failed hire already costs between 50 and 200% of annual salary to replace. Under the new landscape, you add legal exposure, documentation risk, and the reputational cost of managing out someone who was never given the conditions to succeed in the first place.

ERA is a prompt. The conditions are the prize.

The People We Cannot Afford to Lose

Here is the piece most ERA conversations are still missing.

The conditions that make a new hire perform in their first ninety days - psychological safety, clear expectations, flexibility, genuine support - are exactly the conditions that keep experienced women in their forties and fifties in the room. Not as a coincidence. As the same underlying design principle.

Women navigating perimenopause don't leave organisations because they lose ambition. They leave because their capacity decreases while the environment stays rigid. When you build an onboarding experience that genuinely asks what does this person need to thrive here? - and answers it structurally - you are also building the culture that retains your most experienced collaborative leaders too. The same investment does both jobs.

This matters differently for start-ups. You may not carry the same ERA obligations as a large employer when it comes to menopause policy. But that is, quietly, an advantage. Large corporates are moving towards these conditions because regulation is pushing them there. You can move there now - not because you have to, but because it gives you a recruiting edge most competitors haven't understood yet. Experienced women in their forties and fifties, with decades of institutional knowledge and a leadership style research shows is five times more likely to drive high-performing teams, are deciding where to take their next role right now. The organisation that has built genuinely for human capacity - not compliance - will win that race.

What I Built Because I Needed It to Exist

The CEO conversation didn't end with a verdict. It ended with a richer, more honest assessment, one that surfaced the candidate's motivational drivers, strengths, and genuine watch-outs. One that gave the hiring manager a real picture rather than a yes/no. And it became the foundation for how I now work with organisations on the conditions for new hire performance.

The fintech I told you about at the start of this newsletter? I eventually left. I carried what I learned from that environment into fifteen years of coaching and into everything I now know about what makes people genuinely perform.

That work is called the Onboarding Accelerator - a designed arc for the first quarter, not a checklist for week one. Built for COOs, HR directors, and people leaders who want to stop solving in year two the problem they created in week three.

If that's the work you're ready to do: [Onboarding Accelerator link], or email me directly.

With much love and a morning I no longer dread,
Dags