Most leaders are, deep down, afraid of failure. But our 10-year CEO Genome study of over 2,600 leaders showed almost half (45%) suffered at least one major career blow-up — like getting fired, messing up a major deal, or blowing an acquisition. Despite that, 78% of these executives eventually made it to the CEO role. We conducted additional research on 360 executives, analyzing their careers in depth. While all of them experienced a variety of setbacks, 18% of executives in this dataset faced what many view as the very worst-case scenario: getting fired or laid off. Most of them lost their job at a relatively senior point in their career (only 17% were in their first decade in the workforce at the time they were let go). What we found is that being fired or laid off doesn’t necessarily have catastrophic effects on leaders’ prospects. We also found that leaders can do some specific things to make sure that a major setback doesn’t become a career-killer. The good news: 68% of e
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