There's a moment in almost every growth-stage company when the leadership team looks at a persistent problem — execution is slow, priorities keep colliding, something keeps falling between the cracks — and reaches for the same answer: we need a new VP. A new head of engineering, a new VP of product, a new operations leader who will finally make it work.
It feels decisive. It's something the board can understand and approve. And it's usually treating the wrong thing. The new leader is the prescription for a disease the company hasn't actually named.
Because here is what consistently happens next. The new VP arrives with energy and a strong track record. Within two quarters they are tangled in the same unclear ownership, the same colliding priorities, the same decisions that take a week and then get reopened. The problem didn't leave with the last person. It was never about the person.
The reflex hides a missing system
The "we need a new leader" instinct assumes the problem is capability — that the right individual will simply be good enough to overcome the friction. But most chronic execution problems in growth-stage companies aren't capability diseases at all. They're operating-model diseases.
An operating model is the system that decides how the company actually runs day to day. When it's healthy, three things are clearly defined:
- Decision rights. For any given decision, it's clear who decides, who is consulted, and who simply needs to know. Decisions get made once and stay made.
- Cadence. There's a stable rhythm for setting priorities, reviewing progress and resolving conflicts — so the plan doesn't get rewritten every week by whoever spoke loudest.
- Ownership. Every outcome that matters has exactly one accountable owner, not three partial ones and not zero.
When any of these is missing, the company runs on heroics. Things get done because individuals push hard and improvise the missing structure. That can look fine for a while — until it doesn't, and the symptom surfaces. The reflex is then to blame the person standing nearest to the symptom, when the real disease lives in the Operating Model family, and often in the Leadership & Capability family alongside it.
A great leader dropped into a broken operating model doesn't fix the system. The system slowly breaks the leader.
New people inherit old diseases
This is the part that makes the hiring reflex so expensive. A new VP doesn't get a clean slate — they inherit the existing system exactly as it is. If decision rights were ambiguous before, they're still ambiguous on day one. If three executives each believe they own the roadmap, the new arrival walks straight into that crossfire.
So the new leader spends their first year not driving outcomes but absorbing dysfunction — refereeing the same unresolved boundary disputes, re-making decisions that won't stay made, and slowly concluding what their predecessor concluded. Often they leave. And the company, having now failed twice with strong people, draws the worst possible lesson: that the role is cursed, or that good talent is impossible to find. Two excellent hires get blamed for a disease neither of them was ever empowered to cure.
Meanwhile the actual fix was never an org-chart change. It was an operating-model change — and those are usually faster and cheaper than a senior search, because they don't require finding a unicorn. They require naming and installing the missing system.
Fix the operating model, then decide on the role
The right sequence is the opposite of the reflex. Before you open a senior search, diagnose whether the role is genuinely empty or whether the system around it is broken. A few questions surface this quickly:
- If we hired the best possible person for this role tomorrow, would the boundaries of their authority actually be clear — or would they be negotiating them for months?
- How many of our recurring problems are really the same unmade or re-made decision wearing different costumes?
- When something falls between the cracks, is it because nobody is capable — or because nobody clearly owns it?
If the honest answers point at the system, then the prescription is to repair the operating model first: define decision rights, install a real cadence, assign single-owner accountability. Sometimes, once you do that, you discover you don't need the new VP at all — the existing leaders just needed a system that let them lead. Other times you still hire — but now the new leader inherits clarity instead of chaos, and actually succeeds.
This is the heart of what good advisory work does: it stops the company from prescribing an expensive treatment for an undiagnosed disease. The org chart is the most visible lever a CEO can pull, which is exactly why it's pulled too soon. The operating model is the invisible one underneath — and it's almost always the one that actually needs treating.
Before opening a senior search, prove the role is genuinely empty rather than broken — because a new leader inherits your old operating model intact, and no individual can out-talent a missing system of decision rights, cadence and ownership.