The most damaging talent decisions I have seen at senior level have almost always been shadow decisions.
They are moves that felt rational at the time, were rationalised thoroughly afterwards, and were, underneath, about the leader’s own unresolved material projected onto the person leaving. The pattern is consistent across the cases I have worked with. The person who describes the decision as “a difficult call I had to make” is, usually, describing something other than what actually happened.
A specific case
The leader was the CEO of a mid-sized professional services firm. Competent, well-regarded, commercially successful. He had built the senior team largely by himself over a decade, and had a reputation — internally and in his market — for being a good judge of talent.
The person he fired was, by every measurable indicator, the most valuable operator on his executive team. An extremely capable strategist, responsible for the firm’s two largest client relationships, and the person most often cited by other team members as holding the quality of the firm’s work together. Her departure would — and did — create material operational risk that took the firm eighteen months to address.
The stated reason was “strategic fit.” A common shorthand, in these cases, for something the person naming it cannot quite articulate and would prefer not to examine closely.
The actual reason, which emerged through coaching work with the CEO some months after her departure, was more specific and considerably less defensible. She had become, over approximately two years, the container for a set of qualities the CEO had been unable to integrate in himself.
The mechanism of shadow projection in talent decisions
The mechanism operates through several stages that usually proceed below conscious attention.
In the first stage, the leader encounters someone who visibly carries a quality the leader has disowned in themselves. This is not about the two people being similar. It is about the other person expressing, externally and competently, something the leader has learned not to express. The leader’s own ambition. The leader’s own discomfort with ambiguity. The leader’s own grief. The leader’s own need for recognition. Whatever it is, the other person carries it visibly in a way the leader has arranged not to.
In the second stage, the leader begins to experience friction around the other person. The friction is specific. It does not track with the person’s performance, which is usually excellent. It tracks with the leader’s proximity to the quality the person is carrying. The leader finds themselves irritated, critical, or quietly avoidant in ways they cannot fully account for. They narrate this to themselves as a response to something the person is doing — their tone, their style, their approach — rather than as information about what the person is activating in the leader.
In the third stage, the narrative solidifies. The leader has, by this point, accumulated enough minor frustrations to construct a story about why the person is, on reflection, a poor fit. The story is internally coherent. It is also, almost entirely, a rationalisation of a projection.
In the fourth stage, the narrative becomes a performance concern, then a fit concern, then a termination decision. The organisation accepts the framing because the CEO presents it competently and because no one else has the visibility or the standing to contest it. The person leaves. The organisation, reliably, loses capacity it will struggle to replace.
What the CEO eventually saw
What the CEO in this case eventually saw, through sustained work on the material, was that the person he had fired was carrying the exact quality of direct, commercially confident ambition that he had spent his career not expressing in himself. He was, in his own self-description, a “relationship CEO” — someone whose leadership style emphasised consensus, care, and careful consultation. This was genuinely true. It was also, underneath, partly a defence against his own discomfort with the commercial ambition he had learned early in his life not to express.
The person he had fired did not have that discomfort. She operated with a directness he was unable to match and a commercial confidence he had, for years, been unable to allow himself. Her presence on the team was, for him, a continuous reminder of something he had been organising his leadership around not being. The accumulated friction was not about her fit. It was about what she was making impossible for him to avoid in himself.
Eight months after her departure, he asked me to help him find someone “like her, but with better fit.” I asked him what he meant by better fit. The answer, when he sat with it honestly, was that he wanted someone who carried the same capability but expressed it more apologetically — so that her contribution would not activate in him what the original had activated.
He did not hire her replacement. He did, eventually, begin the work of integrating the quality he had spent two years projecting onto her. It took months. The firm was materially worse off during that period than it would have been if the original hire had been retained.
The question that would have prevented it
Before any significant senior termination, ask one question honestly.
What is this person carrying for me that I am not carrying for myself?
The answer is rarely obvious. It requires some capacity for introspection, some willingness to hold uncomfortable material, and some tolerance for the possibility that the termination the leader is about to defend is less about the person leaving than about something in the leader staying.
Most senior leaders, asked this honestly in advance of a termination decision, can access the answer if they are willing to sit with the question. The answer does not always change the outcome. Sometimes there is genuine misalignment in addition to the projection, and the termination is appropriate even after the shadow material is surfaced. But the termination that is primarily shadow-driven becomes visible as such when the question is asked, and can frequently be prevented.
Asking the question requires capacity that most leaders have not developed. It also requires the willingness to be uncomfortable at the exact moment the organisation is most expecting the leader to be decisive. These are the conditions under which the shadow does its most durable damage, and they are also the conditions under which the question is most needed.
The pattern in aggregate
I cannot claim a precise figure. But across the senior terminations I have worked closely with over the last decade — perhaps thirty, across different sectors and geographies — the pattern I have described appears in something close to half. Not every case. But enough that I now assume the shadow projection frame before assuming any other when asked to consult on a senior termination that has not yet happened.
Organisations that are structurally serious about senior talent would, in my view, do well to build the question into their own processes. Before any executive-level termination is finalised, the decision-maker is required to sit with one other person — a coach, a trusted advisor, someone outside the political system — and answer, honestly: what is this person carrying for me that I am not carrying for myself?
This is an inexpensive intervention. It is also, in my experience, one of the most protective mechanisms an organisation can build into its senior talent architecture. The shadow-driven termination that would have happened anyway still happens. The ones that the question prevents are disproportionately the ones that would have cost the organisation its most valuable contributors.
The Alchemy of Leadership: Five Elements Workbook
The developmental architecture that addresses the shadow material most likely to drive senior talent decisions — before those decisions get made. Available free.