What every leadership search assumes… but almost no one resolves.
Last week, I wrote about why PR gets people to look, but doesn’t decide what they see.
As my work evolved from public relations into creative direction, I spent years working directly with founders, owners, and CEOs of consumer brands. As the co-owner of a boutique agency, my relationships weren’t with marketing departments. They were with the people responsible for the future of the business.
Over time, I noticed something.
Whenever a company began searching for a CEO, the conversation quickly turned to the candidate.
Experience.
Leadership style.
Culture fit.
Industry knowledge.
Vision.
The search brief was usually clear.
The business wasn’t.
Those questions matter.
But they aren’t the first questions.
The first question is:
What, exactly, are you asking someone to lead?
Not the legal entity.
Not the org chart.
The business your market believes it’s encountering.
Companies hire CEOs because something has changed.
The founder is stepping back.
The company has outgrown its original structure.
Private equity has entered the picture.
Growth has created complexity.
The next chapter requires different leadership.
All true.
But before you ask someone to lead the next chapter…
you need to decide what chapter you’re actually writing.
I’ve seen founders searching for visionary CEOs when the real challenge wasn’t vision.
I’ve seen them searching for operators when the real challenge wasn’t operations.
They were asking leadership to solve a problem of understanding.
The problem wasn’t leadership.
It was coherence.
Every executive search firm wants to know who you’re looking for.
Every candidate wants to understand the mandate.
Every board wants alignment.
Every one of those conversations assumes something more fundamental has already been decided.
Often, it hasn’t.
A CEO can’t create organizational coherence.
They can strengthen it.
They can protect it.
They can embody it.
But they can’t invent it.
Just as PR amplifies a signal…
Leadership amplifies one.
The wrong CEO can expose incoherence.
The right CEO can only amplify coherence that’s already there.
Before you hire a CEO, ask a simpler question.
If your next CEO described your business after their first thirty days, would you recognize it?
If the answer changes depending on who’s in the room…
the search hasn’t started yet.
The hire isn’t the issue.
The sequence is.
