The hire that decides your institution's next decade

A leader will tell you, with admirable honesty, exactly what is going to disrupt their institution in the next decade. Then they will open a search for their deputy, the person being explicitly groomed to succeed them, and the criteria will describe someone equipped for the last decade's problems, not the next one's. I have watched this pattern often enough that it has stopped looking like coincidence.

The single decision that shapes an institution's next decade most often is not strategy or capital. It is who you choose to sit in the seat next to you. The deputy. The number two. The heir. And most leaders get this seat catastrophically wrong, for an interesting reason. They hire mirrors.

A bank will say its next decade belongs to digital transformation and embedded finance, then promote the relationship banker who built the corporate book in the analogue era. A hospital will say it must shift toward value-based care and digital workflows, then promote the physician with the longest list of academic citations.

A ministry will say it must deliver a sweeping reform agenda, then appoint the technocrat who knows how the old system worked. Each institution has correctly diagnosed its disruption. Each then hires to perpetuate the institution it already is, not the one its own leader said it must become.

Why does this happen? Because excellence in a domain is the most legible thing a hiring committee can measure. Citations are countable. Awards are countable. Years in post are countable. The capabilities the next decade actually demands, AI literacy, regulatory navigation, fluency in capital structuring and comfort holding unfamiliar tradeoffs, are messier to assess and easier to discount.

Committees default to what they can count, then convince themselves they have hired for the future when they have hired a younger version of the past.

The research is unkind to this instinct. Boris Groysberg's work at Harvard Business School followed more than a thousand star Wall Street analysts across job moves and found that their probability of remaining top-ranked roughly halved after a switch, with the decline persisting for at least five years. Performance was contextual.

The very qualities that made stars in one institution turned out to be inseparable from that institution's specific environment, and the selection criteria that identified them were a poor guide to who would thrive elsewhere. If domain excellence does not even survive a lateral move, expecting it to survive a decade of sectoral disruption is heroic.

What looks like individual brilliance is, in many cases, a product of fit between a person and a context that no longer exists once either is changed. That is a hard finding for any committee that has just spent six months hunting for the most decorated candidate on the market.

The heir seat is where this matters most. Hiring an entry-level role badly is recoverable. The person stays a few years, contributes what they can, moves on and the institution is largely unchanged.

Hiring the heir badly is not recoverable on any reasonable horizon. That person inherits the corner office, the convening power, the budget and the next decade of strategic direction. If they are a copy of the outgoing leader, the institution gets a second tenure of the first, executed without the founding context that made it work. The world, meanwhile, has moved on.

What does the better instinct look like in practice? It looks like a leader confident enough to choose a deputy who is unlike them in the dimensions the future will demand, then committed enough to mould that person in the dimensions the leader has already mastered.

A world-class clinician choosing a deputy with deep operational and digital fluency, then teaching them clinical judgment over the years they have together. A career banker choosing a deputy who understands data and platform economics, then teaching them credit and risk.

The complementary hire is harder to make and harder to defend in a committee room. It also compounds, because the institution gains a capability it did not previously have rather than reinforcing a capability it already has in surplus.

There is a human reason the better instinct is so rare. The complementary deputy, someone unlike the leader in the dimensions the future will demand, will at moments make the current leader feel less indispensable.

Their strengths will expose gaps that the leader has lived with comfortably for years. A mirror does no such thing. A mirror reassures. The price of that reassurance is paid by everyone who comes after.

This is why heir-slot hiring is not, ultimately, a personnel matter. It is the moment institutions calcify on purpose, dressed as a hiring decision.

The question worth sitting with, for any leader currently shaping a senior search, is uncomfortable but clarifying. Are you looking for the person who will run the institution you already built, or the person who will build the next one? If the honest answer is the first, you are not hiring an heir. You are hiring an echo. And echoes do not survive the decade ahead.

Surgeon, writer and advocate of healthcare reform and leadership in Africa