Most MD searches I am running at the moment are not really searches for an MD. They are searches for a leader who can drive a change the business has been avoiding for years.
The brief says one thing. The conversation behind the brief says something else.
The diagnostic moment
I sat with a leadership team recently. SME manufacturer, privately owned, well known in their sector, slow to adapt. They wanted an MD. We worked through the business and they mentioned, almost in passing, that they had only just recruited a sales manager.
So I asked the obvious question.
Why have you only just recruited a sales manager?
The answer was honest.
We kept meaning to, we just never got round to it.
That, for me, is the actual problem.
The vacancy is real. The MD hire is necessary. But the hire is downstream of something the business has been avoiding for years. Not capability. Not capital. Behaviour. The leadership team has settled into a way of working that does not get round to the things it knows it should be doing.
The brief is solving the wrong problem
If you hire to that brief, you are solving a procurement question, not the business question.
Procurement question: who can run this business.
Business question: who can lead this team out of a way of working that has quietly started to hold the business back.
Those are two different hires. They look the same on a job spec. They feel very different on day one.
The danger with the procurement brief is that the most plausible CV wins. Someone who has done the title before, in a comparable business, with the right P&L scale. That candidate is not wrong. They are just not the answer to the underlying question. They walk in expecting to inherit a functioning leadership rhythm. They inherit a team that has been quietly procrastinating for years instead. Within ninety days they are firefighting too.
What procrastination actually looks like
It rarely shows up on the dashboard as procrastination. It shows up as operational drift.
Sales manager recruited five years late. Sales structure never modernised. Commercial process built around a couple of people who have been there twenty years. No accountability framework. Margin softening for reasons that nobody on the team can articulate with conviction. Meetings that revisit the same three issues every month and resolve none of them.
None of those individual items look existential. Read together, they describe a leadership culture that has learned how to live with the things it cannot bring itself to fix.
A new MD will be measured, fairly or not, on whether the drift stops. If the brief does not name the drift, the hire arrives without the licence to address it.
What the right hire actually has to do
The right hire does the job, yes. But the job is not the headline.
The headline is whether the person can bring the behaviour the team has been missing. The discipline to confront the conversations that have been deferred. The patience to build the systems and processes the team did not build for themselves. The personal authority to hold a line on a change the business has been avoiding, while the people who avoided it are still in the room.
That last bit is the hard part. The team that signs off the hire is the same team that will subtly resist what the hire is there to do. Not maliciously. Just out of muscle memory. It is comfortable, the way they work. The new MD has to make a different way feel safer than the old one.
I am not sure that shows up on a CV.
A different test for the hire
It is the test we run, and the one I think more leadership teams should run on themselves before they go to market.
Move past “have they done this before”. The honest answer in any non-standard market is often that nobody has. Defence sub-sectors like autonomous vehicles are an obvious example. The market is too young for that experience to exist. Demanding it just narrows your pool to a shortlist of zero.
The better question is harder. Do they have the behavioural agility to lead a team out of a way of working it has settled into for years. Do they make sharper decisions under pressure than under comfort. Can they hold the line on the unpopular call when the room is not yet behind it. Have they done that, in some form, in some sector, before.
That is the assessment that pays. It is also why we run at around 96% right first time. Not because the CVs are better. Because we look past them.
Before you go to market
The honest place to start, if you are a chair, a CEO or a leadership team about to brief a search, is to ask the same question I ended up asking that client.
Why are we only doing this now.
If the answer is “we kept meaning to, we just never got round to it”, the brief on the table is solving the wrong problem.
The hire is still necessary. But the conversation worth having before you go to market is what the right problem actually is. Sometimes that conversation reshapes the brief in a single afternoon. Sometimes it changes who you are looking for entirely. Either way, the search that follows costs you less in real terms than the one that does not.
If the brief on your desk feels like it is solving the wrong problem, that is the conversation worth having first.
