The Question Behind the Appointment

Appointing a chief executive is the most consequential decision most boards ever make. Yet the selection process often optimises for the wrong signal: candidates are assessed on the size of the organisations they have run rather than on the difficulty of the changes they have delivered. Stewardship and transformation are different skills, and boards frequently need the latter while recruiting for the former.

My perspective on this comes from an unusual vantage point. I spent five years leading the campaign that overturned a rule which had stood in British professional boxing for nearly ninety years — the ban preventing boxers with Type 1 diabetes from holding a professional licence. That campaign, which ended with the first such licence ever granted in the UK, was a masterclass in how institutions change and, just as importantly, in the kind of leadership that changes them. Boards would do well to look for that kind of leadership when they choose their next chief executive.

Look for Evidence of Changed Minds

Any strong candidate can describe organisations they have managed. Far fewer can point to a moment when they changed the mind of an institution — when they took a position that was initially rejected and, through evidence and persistence, made it the consensus. That is the signature of a reform-capable leader.

In the boxing campaign, nothing was won by authority. Every advance came from building a case: recruiting medical experts, assembling data on modern diabetes management, and answering each safety objection with a workable protocol. Ask your candidates for their equivalent story. Where is the rule, strategy or orthodoxy that exists differently today because they made the case? If the answer is thin, you are hiring an operator, not a leader of change.

Test for Stakeholder Range

Chief executives fail more often on relationships than on strategy. The modern CEO must hold credibility with constituencies that share almost nothing — regulators and commercial partners, specialists and generalists, traditionalists and reformers. The campaign demanded exactly this range: medical panels required clinical precision, governing bodies required institutional respect, and the public conversation required clarity and restraint.

Boards can test for this range directly. Put candidates in front of different stakeholder groups during selection and watch whether they adapt their register without changing their substance. Leaders who say the same thing to every audience in the same way are not consistent; they are inflexible. Leaders who say different things to different audiences are not adaptable; they are unreliable. The rare skill is holding one truth and making it land everywhere.

Weigh Patience as Heavily as Pace

Boards love momentum, and candidates know it — so interviews fill with hundred-day plans and quick wins. But the changes that define an organisation's decade are multi-year efforts: governance reform, cultural change, repositioning for a shifting market. Five years of campaigning taught me that the decisive leadership quality over those horizons is not speed but staying power — the ability to hold direction through setbacks that would exhaust a less committed leader.

Probe for it. Ask candidates about the longest sustained effort of their career, what it cost them, and where they nearly gave up. The answers reveal more about CEO temperament than any vision statement. My own journey — from founding and scaling businesses to advisory roles across sport and government — convinces me that endurance is the least discussed and most decisive executive virtue.

Insist on a Felt Duty of Care

Finally, and above all: the next chief executive must demonstrably care about the people the organisation exists to serve. In sport, that means athletes. The boxing campaign succeeded because, beneath the data and the protocols, it was anchored in a simple conviction — that dedicated athletes deserved to be assessed as individuals rather than dismissed by category.

A CEO who carries that conviction makes a thousand small decisions correctly without needing to be told. One who lacks it will eventually make one large decision wrongly, no matter how impressive the CV. Boards can sense the difference if they look for it: ask candidates whose lives are better because of a decision they took, and listen for specificity rather than sentiment.

The Appointment as a Statement

Every CEO appointment tells the organisation's people what the board truly values. Choose a caretaker, and you announce that the status quo is the strategy. Choose a proven reformer with judgement, evidence-discipline and endurance, and you announce that the organisation intends to shape its future rather than defend its past.

The athletes, members and communities your organisation serves will feel the difference within a year. Boards navigating this decision are welcome to explore my advisory services or start a conversation through the contact page.