Does a company’s success today show that the team running it is ready for tomorrow’s world?
The risk that goes unseen in the shadow of good results: the management team’s capacity for renewal.
Success is sometimes the greatest obstacle to transformation.
Because failure forces us to think. Success, on the other hand, often offers a reason strong enough for us to stop thinking.
What is more, this danger does not arise only in companies in difficulty. Companies with the strongest financial results, the most experienced executives and the most established management systems can fall into the same trap.
Picture a senior leadership team. The company is growing. Profitability targets are being met. The customer portfolio is expanding. The board is satisfied. The CEO is experienced, the directors have a firm grip on their work, and everyone is successful in their own area of responsibility.
From the outside, there is no problem. But when you look a little more closely at the meetings, a different picture may emerge: The same people are talking. The same assumptions are accepted as valid. The same success indicators are being tracked. Strategic decisions are made with improved versions of methods that have worked before.
No one is making a big mistake. But no one is learning enough that is new, either.
The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) calls this situation the “plateau” of senior leadership teams: the stalling of a management team’s capacity to learn, question and renew itself while financial results are still strong. I read this plateau through two distinct kinds of performance: results performance and renewal performance.
While the company’s performance continues to rise, the management team’s capacity to manage the future may be declining.
The blindness that success creates
In its study “Moving Beyond the Plateau to Strengthen Senior Leadership Team Performance,” dated 28 October 2026, CCL draws attention to an important paradox: management teams that produce strong results can also settle into their habits and remain on a plateau. [1]
One of the scientific foundations of this study is a meta-analysis that synthesizes more than 3,000 statistical relationships from longitudinal research representing over 11,000 teams. The important methodological distinction here is this: the meta-analysis does not consist only of senior leadership teams. CCL relates the research findings to its senior leadership experience and to its assessment of the development priorities of 12 senior leadership teams. [1, 2]
The mechanism CCL highlights is that team behaviors show a certain inertia over time and that feedback loops form between results and ways of working. This does not imply a straightforward causality such as “success weakens teams.” It does, however, offer a strong explanation for why successful results can make questioning the current method seem unnecessary.
It is understandable that decision patterns that were successful in the past get repeated. Executives see realized successes, not an uncertain future, as evidence. But past success does not guarantee that future conditions will remain the same.
The customer segment that was right yesterday may become the limit to growth tomorrow. The organizational structure that created efficiency yesterday may slow down innovation tomorrow. The leadership style that worked yesterday may cause you to lose tomorrow’s talent.
The problem is not having been successful in the past. The problem is taking the method that succeeded in the past to be the right method for the future as well.
The second performance boards cannot see
In companies, we have strong systems for measuring performance: financial indicators, market share, operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, employee engagement and growth rates. But there is something we measure far less: the capacity of the senior leadership team that produces these results to keep making high-quality decisions in the future.
That is why we should assess senior leadership performance on two separate levels. The first is results performance: to what extent is the company achieving its goals today? The second is renewal performance: how early does the management team notice new conditions, how boldly does it question its assumptions and how quickly can it change the way it works?
A company that manages the first strongly and the second weakly may look successful in the short term; but it may be accumulating risk in terms of its readiness for the future.
McKinsey’s research, dated 2 October 2025 and based on 354 senior leadership team members at 28 large companies, also shows that team health cannot be reduced to shared goals alone. The study addresses structure, behaviors and perceived outcomes under separate headings; because the sample is weighted toward Asia-Pacific companies, the results should not be carried over unchanged to all countries. [3]
A management team believing in the same goal does not mean it can question whether that goal is still the right one.
Silence is not always harmony
In senior leadership meetings, the most dangerous moment is not always a heated debate. Sometimes it is everyone agreeing very quickly.
Of course, not every quick consensus is a problem. Good preparation and clear decision criteria speed up high-quality decisions. But if disagreements are becoming invisible, if executives are waiting for the CEO’s view and if alternative scenarios are not discussed enough, silence may be a sign of intellectual narrowing.
In experienced teams, the risk is more subtle. People know one another; they anticipate which debates will lead nowhere. Over time, open conflict may give way to a silent consensus based on expectations. This situation, which looks like organizational calm, can weaken the capacity to generate strategic options.
Amy Edmondson’s 1999 study of 51 work teams is a classic reference showing the relationship between psychological safety and learning behavior. It is not right to transfer its findings directly to all senior leadership teams or to every context; but it explains why people’s ability to ask questions, report mistakes and raise objections needs to be considered together with learning. [4]
A good senior leadership team is not only one that can make decisions together, but one that can also discuss the possibility of being wrong together.
Protecting success, or renewing the capacity to produce success?
The dilemma CEOs face is real: why change a system that works? Because if transformation begins only when performance declines, it may already be too late. The opposite is also true: a constant search for change can disrupt well-functioning processes, lower decision quality and create unnecessary uncertainty in the organization.
My proposal is not that successful companies restructure constantly. It is that, while protecting the system that produces success, they regularly test the assumptions on which that system rests.
Planning organizes the chosen future. Strategy chooses which future we will pursue. But if the senior leadership team does not update its assumptions about the future, then however well it plans, it may be managing a continuation of the past.
That is why we should assess not only our strategic goals but also our strategy-making behaviors. How much room does new information find in our meetings? Does change in customer behavior really affect our decisions? Who advocates for alternative scenarios? Can we consciously bring to an end a practice that was successful in the past? Can an idea the CEO strongly supports be challenged with evidence?
The team leading the transformation must transform too
Most corporate transformation programs focus on the lower layers of the organization. We design new competencies, processes, technologies and performance systems. But how much do we change the way the senior leadership team that will lead the transformation works?
If the board’s decision cycle stays the same while we expect agility from the organization; if different views cannot be voiced in senior leadership while we ask employees for innovation; if directors are assessed only on the results of their function while the company seeks synergy, there is an invisible contradiction.
We want the organization to change; but we allow the system that runs it to stay the same.
That is why I think the next wave of transformation in successful companies should begin with a new decision discipline before a new organization chart. Not only leadership competencies; strategic assumption testing, constructive disagreement, cross-functional decision quality and learning rhythm should also enter the transformation agenda.
CCL recommends checkpoints at around day 10, day 40 and day 80 as a useful implementation rhythm for tracking and reinforcing new behaviors. [1] This timeline should be seen not as an automatic guarantee of success, but as a disciplined cycle of experimentation and learning for management teams.
The real question at the top
It is easy to understand an unsuccessful company’s need for change. Financial results deteriorate, customer losses rise, profitability declines. Recognizing that a successful company is unprepared for the future is harder, because the current indicators are still good.
That is why I believe CEOs and boards need to ask themselves this question: will the management team that produces our results today also be able to make the right decisions under tomorrow’s different conditions?
We cannot find the answer in the financial statements alone. We must also look at the team’s speed of learning, the way it evaluates different ideas, its courage to make difficult decisions and its capacity to give up its own formula for success when necessary.
Sustainable success is not doing the same thing better and better. It is being able to decide to do something different when necessary.
Success is sometimes not the proof of a good strategy, but the last strong period of old habits.
You know how successful your company is today. But do you really know how ready your senior leadership team is for the future?
Sources
The numerical research findings in the text are limited to the samples defined by the respective organizations. The distinction between results performance and renewal performance is the interpretation and application framework of this article; it is not an independent scale whose validity has been tested.
- CCL (28.10.2026), Moving Beyond the Plateau. Open the source.
- Loignon et al. (05.10.2026), Journal of Applied Psychology, DOI: 10.1037/apl0001407. Open the source.
- McKinsey (02.10.2025), Demystifying top-team performance. Open the source.
- Edmondson (1999), Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Open the source.