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As 2025 draws to a close, it is the perfect moment to pause and reflect. At Flyntrok, we believe the most valuable lessons are found in those moments of reflection. That is why we offer you our End-of-Year Reflection Series.
We have curated and invited experts across diverse fields to share their perspectives on the defining moments and trends of 2025. Each brings a unique lens to their respective areas ranging from the world of HR to leadership and research. This series isn’t just about looking back; it’s about gaining the perspective you need to make sense of a changing world and chart your course for 2026 with intention.
Abhijit Pendse is a HR and Leadership Development expert at SKF in Gothenburg, Sweden, with over 27 years of experience running global leadership initiatives. He specializes in innovative approaches to leadership development and brings strong, evidence-based points of view on what makes leaders succeed—and what makes them fail. When someone has spent 25+ years watching leaders across continents, studying activist investor interventions, and designing programs to transform leadership teams, their observations about leadership failures carry weight.
Over to Abhijit…
Here are my top 5 patterns from 2025 which cause leadership failures. Of course they happen every year, 2025 just seemed to have more of these failures..
1. Leaders as Poor Students of History
Why is it that intelligent, successful leaders continue to ignore the lessons from their own and others’ experiences despite knowing the adverse consequences of their decisions on people and organizations?
As I prepared for a conversation with the management team of a startup company on lessons for startups from grown-up companies—Byju’s, Bombay Shaving Company, and others. The pattern was unmistakable: leaders repeating mistakes that had been documented, analysed, and warned against.
Yet leaders act as if their situation is uniquely different, as if the rules do not apply to them.
The cost of this historical amnesia? Predictable failures that could have been avoided. Organizations that repeat the same mistakes. People who suffer the consequences of decisions that ignore obvious warning signs.
2. Boards That Enable Incompetency
Activist investors rattle boards and executive management by bringing in data on company underperformance and exposing inefficiencies in the organization. Yet boards often sit as if conspiring to let the gradual build-up of incompetency go unchecked.
Again, how do these competent, capable, and successful individuals miss the mark so widely?
White papers published by Trian Partners (Disney, P&G), studying changes in Unilever, and understanding Cevian Capital’s approach and many others show the basic trigger in companies where activist investors enter is consistent. For instance:
- The company has tremendous potential for shareholder maximization, yet it has been consistently underperforming over years.
- The incumbent board and executive management refuse to act on data that marks mediocre performance, incompetency, and inefficiencies
Boards are supposed to be the guardians of organisational health. Instead, they become enablers of gradual decline. They see the data. They hear the warnings. They choose inaction until an external force—an activist investor—makes it impossible to ignore.
3. The Shareholder Value Trap
Leaders lose personal credibility when they are seen only as champions of shareholder value creation.
Leaders want employees to have faith in a “glorious future” and, for that, to endure discomfort and pain in the present—redundancies, closures, restructuring. The employees and Works Councils, on the other hand, are preoccupied with the present and are not excited by this “glorious future” storyline.
The disconnect is profound. Leaders stand in front of their teams talking about long-term value creation while simultaneously announcing decisions that destroy lives today. They speak the language of shareholder returns while employees are calculating whether they can pay rent next month.
Credibility is not built on future promises alone. It is built on balancing the present and future. When leaders are perceived as caring only about shareholder value, they lose the trust of the people who must execute the transformation. Without trust, transformation fails.
But the reverse is equally worrying as you will see in the next key trend/mistake that shaped 2025 for many leaders.
4. The Say-Do Gap on Long-Term Value
While there are some leaders who over-index and think only long term. There is an increasing, worrying trend for leaders in organisations to give more weight to the short term than to the long term.
Long-term value creation sits in all internal and external storylines, but not in day to day practice. Most leaders have conveniently misunderstood Keynes’ warning.
“The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead,” wrote John Maynard Keynes in his 1923 work, A Tract on Monetary Reform.
Keynes was making an economic argument about policy flexibility, not giving leaders permission to ignore the future. Yet leaders quote this line to justify short-term thinking while simultaneously claiming they are building for the long term.
The inconsistency is glaring. Leaders talk long term in strategy documents and investor presentations. They act short term in quarterly decisions and resource allocations. This say-do gap erodes trust faster than almost anything else.
Employees see it. Boards see it. Markets eventually see it. But leaders convince themselves the contradiction does not exist.
5. Echo Chambers That Block Ground Truth
All four patterns point to a deeper problem: leaders operating in environments where dissent is silenced, challenge is unwelcome, and ground truth never reaches the top.
This is why they ignore history—no one reminds them of past failures.
This is why boards enable incompetency—dissenting board members at times are marginalised.
This is why they lose employee credibility—they hear a filtered version of frontline reality.
This is why they are inconsistent—no one holds up a mirror for the gap between words and actions.
Echo chambers are not built intentionally. They emerge gradually. Leaders surround themselves with people who agree. Those who disagree learn to stay quiet or leave. Information gets filtered on its way up. Bad news gets softened. Warnings get dismissed.
The result? Leaders making decisions based on a distorted version of reality. Organisations heading toward predictable failures that everyone except leadership saw coming.
The most dangerous sentence in any organization is not “We failed.” It is “No one told me.”
Because usually, someone did. They were just not heard.
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These five patterns are not new. They have been present in failing organisations for decades. What made 2025 different is that the gap between what leaders say and what they do became impossible to hide.
Leadership is not about having all the answers. It is about creating the conditions where the right questions can be asked and all answers have a voice.
We invite you to look back at 2025 through your own experiences of listening and understanding. This will be important as you chart the work that matters in 2026. A personal reflection guide (New Beginnings) is available for you at flyntrok.com/point-of-view.
