A construction leadership hire that is struggling at 90 days has one of three causes: the wrong person, the right person left without what the seat requires, or a brief that described a different job. Find which one before acting. Then run a 30-day correction with named outcomes, and decide by day 120.
The review is booked for Thursday at four. Your new director of operations has been in the seat 90 days, two superintendents have stopped sending over their schedules, and the form in front of you has a box labeled “meeting expectations.” A failing leadership hire rarely looks like failure at this stage. It looks like a quiet you cannot explain.
You hired this person, and you liked them. You may still. So the instinct is to reach for a verdict, good hire or bad one, because a verdict ends the discomfort. What the next 30 days need from you is less satisfying and more useful: a diagnosis.
Why is a construction leadership hire failing at 90 days?
For one of three reasons: the wrong person was hired, the right person was never given what the seat requires, or the seat described in the brief is not the seat that exists. The symptoms overlap almost completely. The evidence for each, and the remedy, do not.
Call them a hiring error, an onboarding error and a brief error. Two of the three are the employer’s, which is why the question deserves an afternoon before anyone is told anything.
| Symptom at 90 days | Likely cause | First move |
|---|---|---|
| Work they control alone is weak: reviews miss what the last person caught | Hiring error | Recheck references against the specific gap |
| Decisions are sound but arrive late, or get reversed above them | Onboarding error | Fix access, authority and information this week |
| They are doing the job as written, well, and it is not the job you need | Brief error | Rewrite the seat with them in the room |
| The team routes around them | Any of the three | Ask the team what the person has decided, then sort it above |
| They have gone quiet in meetings they should be running | Onboarding or brief error | Ask what they were told the seat controlled |
The fourth row is the trap. A team routing around a new leader is the most visible symptom and the least diagnostic, because it follows from all three causes.
No public series will sort it for you. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks employee tenure by industry and occupation, which records how long people stay and nothing about why a senior hire did not. The evidence is in your own building.
What evidence separates a hiring error from the other two?
Look at the work the person controls without needing anyone’s permission. If that work is weak, the hire is the problem. If it is sound and everything depending on other people is stuck, look at what the firm gave them. If it is sound and beside the point, reread the brief.
Three checks, in the order that costs least:
- Read the solo work. An estimate review, a cost-to-complete forecast, a recovery schedule, a letter to an owner. Work produced alone shows capability without interference. If a chief estimator’s bid reviews are missing scope the previous one caught, no amount of access will repair it.
- Audit what they were given. Systems access on day one or day 30. A stated signing authority or a guess. An introduction to the owner on the difficult job, or a discovery. The employer’s side of the first quarter is set out in the hundred-day plan, and a leader who was given none of it has not yet been tested.
- Compare the brief to the week. Take the document the search ran on and set it beside the person’s calendar. Suppose a project executive was hired in Houston to lead negotiated healthcare work, and the backlog that arrived is hard-bid public schools. That person is not failing. The seat moved, and most failed searches begin with a brief that was never tested against the work.
Geography belongs in the second check. A chief estimator who relocated to Charlotte for the job does not know the subcontractor market yet, and the relationships a metro’s bid day runs on take longer than a quarter to build. A senior hire’s onboarding timeline runs to the end of the first full cycle they own, a whole bid season for a chief estimator, not to day 90. Coverage that is thin at 90 days was predictable on the day the offer went out.
One caution on the first check. It is tempting to find a hiring error because it is the only one of the three that is somebody else’s fault. A former vice president who took a smaller seat and keeps reaching past it looks like one, and is more often a scope nobody wrote down.
How should the 30-day correction conversation run?
As a plan with three named outcomes, a weekly check and a date, agreed in one meeting and written down the same day. Say what is not working, say what the firm will change on its side, and say plainly that the decision comes at the end.
The conversation has two halves, and most employers deliver only the first. The first half is the gap, stated as outcomes the person controls: the forecast on the hospital job reconciles to the cost report by the fifteenth; every bid over a set value gets a written scope review before it leaves; the two superintendents have a standing weekly meeting that the leader runs. Three is enough. Seven is a list of grievances.
The second half is what the firm owes. If the diagnosis found an onboarding error, name the fix and its date: the authority limit in writing, the report they have been asking for, the owner introduction. A correction plan that asks everything of the hire and nothing of the employer tests the wrong party.
Then hold the calendar. A review at day 90 followed by a 30-day plan puts the decision at day 120, and it should be made on that day, on the three outcomes, by the person who set them. Extending by a few weeks because the conversation is hard is how one difficult quarter turns into three.
When should you end a failing leadership hire?
When the 30 days produce no movement on outcomes the person controlled, with the firm’s own obstacles removed. At that point the cause is capability or fit, more time will not change it, and each added month costs the project, the team and the person.
Do it properly. Federal law limits the reasons an employer may act on, not the decision itself: the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sets out the prohibited practices, discharge included, and the Department of Labor’s termination overview is the federal starting point on what an employer owes at separation. State law and any written employment agreement add their own requirements. A documented plan with dated outcomes is what counsel will ask for, so talk to counsel before the meeting, not after.
If a search firm made the placement, read its guarantee now. Guarantees have windows and conditions, and the conditions bear directly on this diagnosis. Selah Talent Partners’ own, as one example, runs 120 days and is a replacement search, not a refund or a credit. It is live once the placement fee is paid in full, and void if the role is filled from another source, if the person is made redundant, the role is restructured or they are terminated other than for cause, or if the role is materially changed after placement. Knowing which of the three errors you have is not only fair to the hire. It bears on what you can ask of the firm that found them.
The weighing of coaching against replacement over a longer horizon is a separate decision, covered in replace or coach. The 90-day case is narrower, and the stakes on a live job are not small: AGC’s 2025 workforce survey reported workforce shortages as the leading cause of project delays, so a second vacancy in the same seat is not a cheap outcome.
What the firm owes the next person in the seat
Whichever cause the evidence points to, write it down before the seat is filled again. An onboarding error uncorrected will meet the next hire on their first Monday. A brief error uncorrected will produce the same shortlist, the same interviews and the same Thursday review, a year later.
A second hire into an undiagnosed seat is the first hire again, with a different resume.
When the answer is a replacement and the person is still in the seat, the work is confidential executive search for mandates that cannot be publicly posted, and that is what Selah does. Our notes for employers describe how a search of that kind is run.
Sources and further reading
- Employee tenure, Bureau of Labor Statistics news release
- Prohibited practices, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
- Termination overview, US Department of Labor
- Workforce shortages, Associated General Contractors of America, 2025 workforce survey release