The £120,000 Mistake You're About to Make Again
Victoria Canham • 1 July 2026 • 4 min read
The Culture Responsibility Leaders Have to Shoulder
Victoria Canham • 17 June 2026 • 4 min read
July Leadership Series · The People Strategy Reckoning. Part 1 of 5.
A bad senior hire is not cheap. At the VP level, where first-year compensation frequently runs between £160,000 and £320,000, a failed hire represents a direct cost of £48,000 to £96,000 before anyone accounts for team instability, strategic delay, or the cost of restarting the search.
That figure is conservative. It assumes the damage stops at the balance sheet. It does not.
Most organisations respond to this by tightening the recruitment process. More interview rounds. More assessments. A better job description. A different agency. All reasonable interventions, and none of them addressing the actual problem, because the actual problem isn’t and never was the process.
Why the Same Mistake Keeps Happening
A hiring process can be flawless and still produce the wrong leader because it tests for things company culture does not actually recognise and ultimately reward.
The candidate interviews well. They say the right things about collaboration, about empowering teams, about psychological safety. The panel likes them. The references are positive, because references rarely say anything else. The candidate is hired.
Eighteen months later, the same organisation is having the same conversation about the same kind of leader. Capable on paper. Corrosive in practice. Brilliant in the interview room, where the stakes are low and behaviour curated, and entirely different once they are managing real pressure in a real company.
This happens because organisations hire for competence and then discover, too late, that competence wasn’t the issue. The issue was what the organisation's actual culture allows, rewards, and tolerates once someone is in its ecosystem.
What Isn’t Tested Before the Offer Goes Out
Most senior hiring processes test for capability, experience, and presentation. Almost none of them test for what happens when this person is under sustained pressure, accountable for a decision that affects fifty people, and operating within your specific culture rather than a polished interview room.
That is the wrong test, because it is the wrong moment. Interviews capture a person's best behaviour under controlled conditions. The job requires their actual behaviour under uncontrolled ones.
The deeper issue is what the organisation has actually built the hiring process to identify and choose a candidate for. If your culture rewards confidence over judgement, you will keep hiring confident people who lack judgement. If your culture has normalised avoiding difficult conversations, you will keep hiring leaders who avoid them because the ones who don't will be filtered out somewhere in the process, often without anyone consciously deciding to filter them.
The hiring process is not separate from the culture. It is an expression of it. It tells the candidate everything they need to know too.
What This Actually Costs You
The financial cost is the easiest to calculate and the least significant.
The harder cost to swallow is what happens to the team during the eighteen months before anyone admits the hire was wrong. A leader who is the wrong fit does not fail without significant fallout. They fail by shaping the people around them. Good people start leaving. The ones who stay adapt to survive the new leader rather than to do good work. The damage compounds for as long as the organisation hesitates to confront what is happening.
By the time the hire is formally addressed, the cost is no longer £100,000. It is every person who left because of how that leader operated, every piece of work that did not happen because the team was managing around dysfunction instead of doing the job, and every signal sent to the rest of the organisation about what is tolerated at the top.
What Actually Needs to Change
The fix is not an additional interview round, in-depth presentation, or a more detailed scorecard. The fix is an honest answer to a question most organisations have never asked properly: what does our culture actually cause us to, independent of what we say it should?
That requires looking past the values statement and at the evidence. Who has thrived here. Who has been quietly pushed out. What behaviour gets rewarded when the stakes are high and nobody is watching closely. Most organisations have never examined this directly, because the answer is often uncomfortable and rarely matches the version on the careers pages.
Until that question is answered honestly, every recruitment process is optimising for the wrong thing, regardless of how rigorous it looks on paper.
This is Part 1 of a five-part series: The People Strategy Reckoning.
Next: Why nearly 80% of leadership hires are already failing; it has nothing to do with the candidates.
If your organisation has made this mistake more than once, the pattern is worth examining properly. Start with a confidential conversation.
♦️ Hi, I'm Victoria Canham. I work with senior leaders, executives, founders and organisations when performance, pressure and people dynamics reach a point where the usual tools stop working.
My work sits at the intersection of leadership psychology, organisational performance and culture reality. I help executive teams navigate strained relationships, cultural brittleness, emotional fatigue, and the quiet erosion of trust that most businesses prefer not to acknowledge.
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Victoria Canham - Performance and People Strategic Consultant
Victoria Canham works with executive leaders and organisations when performance, culture and emotional pressure collide.
She is a Change Leader with over 25 years of experience, an ICF-accredited Professional Coach and founder of Victoria Canham Consultancy. Her practice focuses on strengthening leadership capability and organisational performance in the real world, not just on paper.
With twenty-five years in talent development, behavioural insight and large-scale change, she supports senior leaders navigating strained relationships, brittle cultures and high-pressure decision-making. Her work helps leadership teams stabilise, rebuild trust and operate with greater clarity and authority.
She is brought in when organisations cannot safely hold difficult conversations internally—when executive teams have stopped saying what needs saying, when founders need to step back, when high-performing individuals are costing more than they deliver. She creates the conditions where those conversations can actually happen, and where organisations can move forward from them.
The result is leadership that functions under pressure, cultures that hold up in practice, and teams equipped to perform sustainably.
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