I’ve watched capable leaders struggle on projects they’d have delivered comfortably at home. Too many organisations still treat leadership as portable. On cross-border projects, contextual fluency decides more outcomes than a strong CV.
The blind spot: a proven leader in the wrong place
Every track record was earned somewhere specific, and a leader carries that playbook into the next job. In a new market, parts of it are wrong, and nobody knows which parts until something breaks.
McKinsey reports that between 27% and 46% of executive transitions are regarded as failures or disappointments two years in. That research doesn’t isolate cross-border moves, where I’d expect the risk to be higher.
You don’t need just a leader. You need the right leader for the moment.
The context gap: how a technical problem becomes a stall
Design changes, ground conditions and inflation are real causes of overrun everywhere. A leader who misreads the context is what lets one of them become a stalled project.
Failure usually runs as a chain. A cultural misread means the leader consults the wrong people. That creates a regulatory blind spot, because the approval that mattered was never on the list. Stakeholders who weren’t consulted stop cooperating. Meanwhile the programme runs on execution assumptions brought from home, such as how long permits take.
Consider a proven leader sent to run a mid-size capital project in a new market. They follow the approvals route they’d use at home. The person who controls site access isn’t on it. Mobilisation goes ahead, the community objects and works stop. Six weeks later, the team is redoing permits it thought were settled.
The pattern of failure is predictable
Local stakeholders start to resist. Informal power, held by people with influence but no title, gets misjudged. A cultural or procedural misstep follows, and credibility goes fast.
None of this makes the leader weak. They often arrived with a home playbook, no local network and no time to learn. Those are conditions, and conditions can change.
Context isn’t a soft skill. It’s a success factor.
What a context-ready interim brings
The right interim brings what a home-grown appointment often can’t. Cross-market fluency means they look for the differences in week one. With no internal baggage, they can put results ahead of politics. Situational agility, proven in complex programmes, means they’ve changed course mid-delivery before. And the exit is agreed at the start, so capability gets built and handed over.
Context fit has limits. It won’t rescue a flawed design or an unrealistic budget, which need fixing on their own terms.
The first 48 hours
A misaligned programme gets dearer every week. I’d want an incoming leader to spend the first 48 hours on three things, in order: diagnose the context gap, map the stakeholder terrain, then set the decision rules that let the project steady.
Action in the first 48 hours is the difference between drift and delivery.
Prepare before you need it
Start with your vulnerable points, such as a first project in a new market or a leadership change mid-programme. Line up who you’d call before you need them, and agree who decides what, at which threshold, before anyone is under pressure. Then ask four questions before you send any leader into a new context:
- Who can stop this project without appearing on our organisation chart?
- Which approvals here run on different rules, or a different clock, from home?
- What would local stakeholders treat as a broken promise?
- Which of our delivery assumptions have we tested in this market?
If the leader can’t answer all four, or say how they’ll find out in week one, you’ve found your gap.
The best organisations don’t wait. They prepare.
Facing a leadership gap in a critical project?
When the leader fits, execution picks up, trust returns and the team realigns. Through Blocx Matrix, I take on a small number of interim and fractional mandates where a programme needs a leader who has worked across markets, to stabilise delivery and leave capability behind. If you’re about to send a leader into a new market, start here.