Why High-Performers Stay Stuck

Six out of ten PE-backed CEOs are replaced within the first year of acquisition (AlixPartners, 2024). The cost of unplanned executive turnover runs to 200% of the leader’s salary (Gallup). The due diligence pipeline that produced these outcomes relies on personality assessments, psychometric evaluation, behavioral interviews, 360-degree feedback, and reference checks—every one of which takes the leader’s self-report as primary input. The Recursive Reliability Effect (Gaconnet, 2026a) identifies why this input is structurally unreliable: in the near-capacity executive population, self-assessment accuracy is wrong about the domain of failure 81.4% of the time (95% CI: 80.7–82.2%) and wrong about the depth 73.0% of the time (CI: 72.1–73.9%). The deeper the structural failure, the less reliably the executive self-reports. This paper applies the Recursive Reliability Effect to two domains simultaneously. First, executive burnout: why high-performers stay stuck despite having access to every coaching, therapy, and leadership development resource available. Second, leadership due diligence: why the PE industry’s assessment pipeline systematically fails to predict which founders and CEOs will sustain performance under post-acquisition load. The structural answer to both is the same: every instrument in both domains operates on the self-report as primary input, and the self-report is recursively unreliable at the rates this paper documents.