Why Results Alone Don’t Tell You Whether Leadership Is Healthy

Results matter.

Any credible evaluation of leadership has to account for whether leaders can execute, meet commitments, and produce the amount and quality of work the organization needs. An organization cannot succeed for long if its leaders consistently fail to deliver.

The problem begins when Results Delivery becomes the entire diagnosis.

A performance number tells us what happened. It does not tell us enough about the leadership that produced it, whether the result is sustainable, or what may be preventing even better performance.

Put differently:

Results are not being valued too much. But, they are commonly being used to provide an overall evaluation of leadership, when they are incapable of doing so.

What Results May Conceal

Strong results can mean very different things.

They may reflect leaders who are building stronger judgment, ownership, learning, and capability throughout the organization.

Or they may depend on heroics, centralized decisions, unsustainable pressure, or a few leaders compensating for weaknesses in the system.

Weak results can be equally misleading. They may reflect leaders who simply do not possess the capability their roles require. But they may also reflect capable leaders who are constrained by unclear strategy, competing priorities, inadequate resources, poor role design, or the surrounding culture.

In other words, similar results can come from very different leadership conditions.

And those differences matter because they can produce very different futures.

The Knicks Offer a Great Example

Tom Thibodeau was hardly unsuccessful as head coach of the New York Knicks.

Over five seasons, he went 226–174, took the Knicks to the playoffs four times, and in 2025 led them to their first Eastern Conference Finals in 25 years.

Yet one criticism followed him throughout his career: he relied heavily on his best players. During that 2025 playoff run, questions again surfaced about whether his starters were being asked to carry too much and whether his rotation was too rigid.

Then the Knicks made the surprising decision to fire him.

Mike Brown took over with largely the same core roster. One of the changes was philosophical: he wanted to use more players, develop the bench, and manage starter minutes so the team would have more left when the playoffs became most demanding. In his first season, the Knicks won the 2026 NBA championship.

It would be too simple to say Thibodeau’s minute management cost the Knicks a championship or Brown’s rotation strategy won one.

But the contrast raises an important leadership question:

Are we producing results by building capacity—or by consuming it?

Thibodeau produced plenty of wins. But if achieving those wins required repeatedly drawing more heavily on the team’s best resources, strong regular-season results could obscure a cost that would only become visible later.

Organizations can do the same thing.

Business History Is Full of Similar Questions

General Electric under Jack Welch produced extraordinary financial results and was widely regarded as one of the world’s best-managed companies. Yet many of the practices associated with that era—intense performance pressure, forced ranking, aggressive financial management, and relentless expectations for growth—were later scrutinized for what they may have done to the organization’s longer-term health.

Boeing raises an even more consequential version of the same question. For years, the company delivered strong financial results while concerns grew about production pressure, engineering influence, safety culture, and the tradeoffs being made inside the organization.

The point is not that strong performance at GE or Boeing was somehow fake.

It is that the results alone could not tell you whether the leadership was enabling capacity or diminishing capacity.

Weak Results Can Mislead Us Too

The opposite mistake happens when results are disappointing. An organization misses targets and concludes, “We have a leadership problem.”

Maybe it does. But what kind?

The Cleveland Browns provide an interesting example. Over the years, they have changed head coaches, quarterbacks, general managers, and front-office structures repeatedly, with relatively little sustained success. They even once employed Bill Belichick, who later became one of the most successful coaches in NFL history. Belichick did produce one playoff season in Cleveland, but ultimately finished 36–44 there.

At some point, that pattern raises a different question: Is the problem simply that the Browns keep choosing the wrong coaches, or has there also been something about the environment surrounding those coaches that makes sustained success harder?

NFL reporting has repeatedly pointed to Cleveland’s instability, constant regime changes, front-office turnover, and lack of continuity as part of the franchise’s difficulties.

Organizations can make the same mistake. Weak results may mean leaders lack the capability their roles require. But they may also mean capable leaders are working within conflicting priorities, poor role design, insufficient resources, unstable strategy, or an environment that makes effective leadership unusually difficult.

Those situations call for very different responses.

If the problem is Leadership Capability, develop the leaders. If the problem is the Leadership Environment, replacing or developing leaders without changing the environment may simply recreate the same problem with a different person.

This Is Why I Think in Terms of Leadership Health

To understand how healthy leadership really is, I believe we need to look at three things together.

• Results Delivery tells us what leaders are producing.
• Leadership Capability tells us about the capability the leaders have to elevate themselves, others, their teams, and the organization over time (and amidst complexity, change, and uncertainty).
• Leadership Environment tells us whether the surrounding system is helping or constraining the skills and capabilities of the leaders.

None gives us the full picture on its own.

Leadership Health is ultimately about understanding whether leadership is producing what the organization needs today while also building the capacity required for tomorrow.

That leads to a more useful question than simply, “Are our leaders getting results?”

Are the results we are producing today strengthening our ability to succeed tomorrow—or quietly consuming the capacity we will need to do so?

In my next article, I’ll introduce three simple 2x2s that help reveal what may actually be happening beneath the results.

If you want to explore the Leadership Health of your executive team, a group of leaders within the organization (e.g., within a division, the VP level), or your organizations overall leadership, let’s connect.