The role changed. The organisation didn’t.

The role changed. The organisation didn’t.

When a senior appointment goes wrong, the conclusion tends to come quickly.

Wrong person. Wrong fit. Not commercial enough. Not strategic enough. Didn’t take enough ownership.

Sometimes that is exactly what happened.

But I think there is another explanation that gets missed.

Sometimes the organisation was never really ready for the role.

I’ve seen this from both sides.

As a founder, I knew how much of the business still sat with me. Customer history, the context behind decisions, which relationships really mattered, which processes were important and which ones everyone quietly worked around.

A lot of that never appeared on an org chart.

Later, as a senior executive brought into larger businesses to build and grow things, I saw the other side.

A title can say you own something. A job description can say you are accountable. But that does not necessarily mean the organisation has actually moved with you.

That is where I think a lot of growing businesses get caught out.

They reach the point where the founder or CEO cannot keep carrying everything, so they hire someone senior. A COO. A CRO. An MD. A senior functional leader.

The brief is usually clear enough: take ownership, build the team, make decisions, free the CEO up.

The assumption is that the person arriving creates the capability.

It does not always work like that.

The CEO may still hold the key customer relationships. Important decisions may still come back upstairs. People may bypass the new executive when they want a different answer. The leadership team may still know who really has the final say.

And when something important goes wrong, the founder steps back in.

Usually for understandable reasons.

They have more history. More context. More instinct around the business. They can often solve something in ten minutes that would take someone else an hour to work through.

The problem is what that teaches everyone else.

The new executive may own the role on paper, but the founder still owns the real decisions.

That is a hard position to succeed in.

Then both sides start getting frustrated.

The founder thinks: “They need to step up.”

The executive thinks: “I was never really allowed to.”

And before long, people start talking about whether the hire was wrong.

Maybe it was.

But I would want to ask a different question first.

Was the business actually ready to support the role?

Could authority genuinely move? Could important relationships move? Could the existing leadership team accept someone new having real ownership? Could the founder resist stepping back in every time something felt uncomfortable?

Those are not really recruitment questions.

They are questions about the organisation.

And this is the part I think matters most.

When you hire someone senior, the CEO’s role has to change too.

We spend a lot of time defining what the new person is going to own. We spend much less time defining what the CEO is going to stop owning.

But if the new executive is genuinely going to lead more of the business, something has to change on the CEO’s side as well.

They may need to hand over authority. Relationships. Decisions. Space.

That is often where the real difficulty sits.

Especially in founder-led businesses.

People have spent years learning how the company actually works. They know who has the history, who can overturn a decision and who to go to if they do not like the answer they have been given.

Unless those habits change, the new executive may have the title without ever having the full role.

That is why I think a senior appointment should be treated as an organisational change, not just a hiring decision.

Before making the hire, I would want to be clear on a few things.

What does this person genuinely own?

Which decisions move with the role?

Which relationships need to transfer?

What will people stop coming to the CEO for?

Where does the new executive have the authority to disagree?

And what happens when they make a decision the founder would not have made?

Those questions tell you much more about whether the role will work than the job description does.

They also help answer another useful question:

Is the problem really the person, or is the organisation making the role harder than it needs to be?

This is also where a fractional executive can sometimes be useful.

Not as a cheaper substitute for a permanent hire, but as a way of helping the business work out what it actually needs, clarify who owns what, tighten up the operating rhythm and see whether the organisation is ready for the role before making a bigger commitment.

Sometimes the right first move is not another search.

It is getting the business ready for the person you want to bring in.

A poor hire is a people problem.

A capable person who cannot get traction may be an organisational one.

So before making your next senior hire, I would ask one question:

Are we hiring someone into a role the organisation is actually ready to support?