8. 5. 2026 People & Opinions
The most dangerous moment in a leader’s career doesn’t come when they fail. It comes when things go well for too long.
Success creates patterns. The longer they work, the fewer reasons you have to question them. And that’s exactly where the problem begins in today’s world.
When working with leaders and organizations across industries, I kept returning to one question. Why do people who are demonstrably qualified, experienced, and previously successful start to underperform at a certain point in time?
They stop working effectively even when nothing obvious has changed. No major mistake. No dramatic decision. Just a gradual shift that, from the outside, looks like a bad year, but from the inside feels like slowly falling behind.
I observed this repeatedly. And the longer I looked, the less sense the most common explanations made. These people weren’t less intelligent. They weren’t working less. They weren’t lacking motivation. Yet they reached a point where they started considering leaving, or where work began to spill into their personal lives in ways they hadn’t experienced before.
I started looking deeper.
The data I have been collecting over time while working with executives consistently shows the same pattern: failure in a new or changed role is rarely caused by a lack of expertise. It is caused by the fact that a person stops reading the actual environment and starts operating based on their internal model of reality — a model that was once accurate, but is no longer up to date. The longer this persists, the larger the gap becomes. And the harder it is to recognize from the inside.
McKinsey’s findings support this as well: between 27 and 46 percent of managerial transitions are rated as failures or disappointments within two years. And 74 percent of U.S. leaders and 83 percent of global leaders admit they felt unprepared for their new role, despite having previously succeeded.³ The problem is not people. It is the gap between what they knew how to do and what the new situation actually required.
Marshall Goldsmith captured it in a phrase that became widely known: “What got you here won’t get you there.” But very few explain what exactly “here” is — or why it is so difficult to recognize from the inside.
I was sitting across from a sales leader. Twelve years in one company, over a hundred million in revenue under his responsibility, a team he had built from scratch. He came in with a technical question: how to improve decision-making processes. Within fifteen minutes, it became clear the question was something else entirely.
The company had changed dramatically over the past two years. New ownership, different pace, different expectations. He was still operating exactly as before: the same reflexes, the same criteria, the same tempo. He was doing precisely what had worked for him in the past. Results started fluctuating. He interpreted it as a team problem.
He didn’t have a competence problem. He had an orientation problem. The environment had changed — and he was still operating according to the rules of a world that no longer existed.
This is not an exception. I see it across industries, organizational types, and levels of leadership. A specialist who becomes a manager and expects a team to function with the same logic as a project. A director who moves into a new company and brings their entire functional system processes, criteria, pace into an environment with a different DNA. A graduate entering their first job with a solid education, only to discover that what they learned is a map, while the terrain looks different. A leader whose team performed reliably for years, until market conditions shifted, yet they continued to manage the same way only more forcefully.
What they share is not role or industry. It is one thing: the environment has changed, but the way it is being read has not.
Performance inertia is the tendency to continue behaving in ways that brought success in the past, even when conditions have fundamentally changed. The greater the past success, the stronger the inertia. And the harder it is to recognize from within.
Competence is a necessary condition. It provides frameworks, not answers. It gives people language, structure, and a starting point. It works exceptionally well in the environment it was built for. And it stops being sufficient the moment that environment shifts.
I would compare it to in-car navigation. Most of us know the feeling: you’re driving with a navigation system, the voice tells you when to turn, and you follow it. The algorithm is smart, it accounts for traffic, it recalculates the route in real time. And yet, sometimes it still gets you somewhere you didn’t intend to go. Not because the navigation failed. But because you stopped paying attention to where you were actually going. You followed instructions. The terrain outside the window stopped being information. It became a backdrop.
Performance inertia works the same way. People follow their internal instruction manual: proven patterns, reliable reflexes, criteria that once brought them to where they are. The system runs. The instructions still make sense. Meanwhile, the terrain has shifted. Not dramatically, not all at once. In small increments. Every decision made sense within the old system. Only in hindsight — or when someone from the outside names it — does it become clear how far it has drifted from reality.
Academic literature describes this phenomenon as the trap of experience:⁴ the better you have mastered a certain way of working, the fewer natural signals you receive to question it. Past success becomes an old map.
An old map in new terrain is not experience. It is risk.
— Dušan Sameliak
And then there is another layer that sustains inertia. In a successful role, people learn to prove their value in a specific way. That way becomes part of their identity. When the environment changes its demands, they continue proving value in a way the new situation no longer requires. And because performance deteriorates more slowly than conditions change, the signal arrives late. At that point, it is easier to attribute decline to external factors than to admit: I am navigating with a map that no longer applies.
The answer to why this is so difficult to recognize is not found in character or intelligence. It is found in the environment. Today’s work world generates such a volume of demands, expectations, interactions, and decisions that the space for calibrating judgment is systematically shrinking. Speed, results, availability, instant feedback. Each of these pressures is manageable on its own. Together, they create an environment in which people slip into a reactive mode before they even realize it. Inertia is not sustained only by what we do. It is sustained by what we stop noticing.
What I observe in individual work with clients is confirmed at a systemic level. Gallup has tracked global employee engagement since 2009. In 2025, it fell to 20 percent, the lowest level since 2020, and in Europe it reaches just 12 percent.¹ The sharpest decline is seen among managers, who previously belonged to the most engaged group. Responsibility increases. Capacity declines. The way of working does not change.
McKinsey found that 92 percent of companies plan to increase investment in AI, yet only 1 percent of executives consider its use in their organization to be truly effective.² MIT studied the impact of these investments on profitability: 95 percent of organizations saw no measurable return.
Investment is rising. Results are not following. Engagement is declining. Tools are available. Change is not happening. This is not a failure of tools — it is a failure of orientation.
Gallup identified in 2026 the key factor that separates organizations where AI actually works from those where it does not. It is not the quality of the technology or the size of investment. It is the manager — specifically their ability to help teams understand what is happening around them and to maintain clear priorities in uncertain environments. Employees whose managers actively perform this role are 8.7 times more likely to say their organization has truly changed.¹ That is not a personality trait. It is a capability.
Performance inertia is not sustained only by what we do. It is sustained by what we are no longer able to see.
— Dušan Sameliak
The leader from the opening scene was not incompetent. He was competent for a world that had changed. That is a crucial distinction, because the second state is much harder to recognize. And even harder to exit through willpower or another training session. It is exited through specific practices that change how a person reads a situation before they act within it.
Take three key decisions from the last quarter and write down what actually drove them — what metrics, assumptions, or rules you relied on.
Then ask yourself:
Do these criteria apply to the situation I am in today, or to the situation in which I originally learned to use them?
The problem today is not that you know too little.
The problem is that you don’t know whether you know the right things.
FROM PRACTICE:
When I ask a leader what criteria shaped their last major decision, they rarely start with criteria. They start with context, pressure, and what needed to be urgently saved. The criteria only appear afterwards — as justification, not as a guiding framework.
We naturally notice what confirms what we already believe, and ignore what could challenge it.
Once a week, ask yourself:
What did not make sense this week according to my assumptions?
These inconsistencies are the most valuable source of orientation in a changing environment. Or ask AI:
“Challenge this decision, idea, or assumption. Tell me what I am missing.”
FROM PRACTICE:
When people are shown information that doesn’t fit their existing view, their first reaction is not to change their perspective — but to protect it. They explain it away as an exception, narrow the context, or label it as “specific to this case.”
In environments where speed once led to results, a strong habit emerges: act immediately.
But in changing environments, fast action without orientation does not produce outcomes. It produces accumulation of decisions made without understanding what is actually happening. The system moves — but it is not being guided.
FROM PRACTICE:
Speed does the most damage in situations where decisions are passed down as tasks, but not as context. People then work quickly and responsibly, but without sufficient understanding of the assignment. The team corrects precision only after execution has already started. And those are not better results — just more expensive mistakes.
Change does not favor the fastest. It favors those who orient most accurately.
— Dušan Sameliak
Leadership education has traditionally been built on transferring knowledge and tools: models, frameworks, case studies. All of these have value — but they prepare people for a predictable environment. For a world where having the right answer and applying it correctly is enough.
The ability to read situations under uncertainty — to recognize what is actually happening, distinguish signal from noise, and make decisions without complete information — cannot be learned from that model alone. It can only be trained in conditions close to reality: where information is incomplete, time is limited, and the correct answer either does not exist or cannot be verified within the available timeframe.
I see this gap consistently in my work with leaders across industries. This is why the perspective I bring into collaboration with NEWTON University is built around one question: how do we develop leaders so that we change the way they decide under pressure — not just what they know?
Performance inertia is not only an individual career issue. It is a question of how we educate leaders for a world where not only tools are changing, but the very conditions of decision-making itself.
What brought you into a new role will not necessarily keep you there. But the way you learn to read the terrain within it can be developed.
Dušan Sameliak works with leaders and organizations on developing the ability to orient and make decisions under pressure, uncertainty, and rapid change. He is the founder of the AMC Institute (Applied Management Capability research project), where he systematically studies how leaders actually make decisions in real business situations.
He collaborates with clients across the Czech Republic, Austria, Switzerland, and the broader CEE region. He has led development projects for organizations including MALL, O2, ČEZ, Danone, Heineken, Coca-Cola, ČSOB, MONETA Bank, Česká spořitelna, Allianz, Ernst & Young, and Raiffeisen Bank.
He lectures management at ČVUT and teaches in the Centre for International Programmes at NEWTON University.
The scenario in the text has been anonymized and published with the client’s consent.
8. 5. 2026 People & Opinions
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