Built For Liftoff
By Jamie Jacobs and Amy Sulgrove
The board celebrated. The search was over, the offer signed, and the announcement sent welcoming the new executive. Eighteen months out, the results of an executive hire diverge. Some are already driving the agenda. Others never found their footing. Most organizations assume the difference comes down to who they picked.
We’d say something different. The variable that matters most isn’t who you hired. It’s how well you built the runway underneath them.
Research from McKinsey and Harvard Business Review points to the same pattern. Executives who take off fast in a new role usually share one advantage: a mandate that was clear from day one, stakeholders who were aligned before they walked in, and a first quarter built for orientation and early wins rather than instant transformation. The executives who never gain that footing are typically just as capable. They simply never got that foundation.
That’s the real opportunity in front of most organizations right now, closing the gap between the executives who launch fast and the ones who stall, a gap driven far more by transition design than by capability.
Search firms have gotten remarkably good at finding the right leader. Sourcing, vetting, reference checks, competing offers, that discipline has been refined into a science. What most organizations haven’t built with the same intention is the first ninety days. The candidate accepts, gets a laptop and a calendar invite to Monday’s all-hands, and the search is considered complete. The bigger opportunity, the one most search processes stop short of, is designing what comes next with just as much rigor.
“I watched this pattern repeat across search after search before I ever gave it a name. The candidates were right for the role. The teams wanted them to succeed. What was missing was a clear definition of what success looked like in the first ninety days, and alignment on that before day one. Closing that gap is where the real advantage lives.”
– Amy Sulgrove
That gap is exactly why Talent Executives and Gig Talent built AMPLIFY™️ together. Talent Executives leads the search: identifying, vetting, and placing the right leader. Gig Talent leads what comes next, a structured ninety-day coaching engagement, the Amplify Leadership Launch™, designed to give every placement the clearest possible path to impact. It covers three things that accelerate almost every strong transition: a mandate everyone can say agrees on, a stakeholder map that’s aligned before the leader walks in the door, and a clear set of first priorities the leader and the organization actually agree on.
This is where our two worlds meet. Amy’s team is focused on finding the right capability. My work at Gig Talent is about making sure organizations are designed to use the capability they’ve invested in. An executive hire is one of the clearest tests of that design. You can bring in the most qualified leader in the market, and the real advantage still comes from how ready the organization is to absorb them well and how well supported they are in the onramp. That’s an operating model question as much as a talent question.
“Great capability walking through the door is only half the equation. The organizations that get the most out of a new leader are the ones willing to redesign a little around them, not the other way around.”
– Jamie Jacobs
Amy puts that same idea into practice from the moment the offer is signed.
“The ninety-day framework is role clarity work, stakeholder alignment sessions, and a first-priorities agreement, done before the leader’s first Monday and reinforced through their first quarter. We’re designing the transition with the same intention we bring to the search.”
– Amy Sulgrove
The upside is real. When a transition is well-designed, momentum builds early. When it isn’t, the cost compounds fast, recruiting, lost productivity, stalled initiatives, and team disruption can add up to several multiples of the executive’s own salary. For a mid-market organization, getting the first ninety days right is one of the highest-leverage investments available.
Hiring carefully matters but recognizing that a great search and a great landing are two different disciplines, and investing in both is key. Bring the same intention to the first ninety days that you bring to the search itself, and the story becomes less about who you hired and more about how quickly they were able to deliver.
If your last executive transition didn’t build the momentum you expected, the opportunity is in the runway, not the leader. We’d love to show you what building for liftoff looks like.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Jamie Jacobs is CEO of Gig Talent, built to deliver principal-evel expertise deployed with precision to accelerate performance, culture, and growth. Her work is grounded in a simple belief: fear is the greatest barrier to transformation and courage expressed through bolder decisions, faster iteration, and more honest leadership is a multiplier that unlocks capability, innovation, and momentum inside organizations.
Amy Sulgrove is the Founder and CEO of Talent Executives Group. After years of working alongside founders, boards, and executive teams during pivotal growth moments, Amy saw firsthand how often leadership search was treated as a transaction rather than a strategic investment. Talent Executives operates as a true thought partner to its clients, combining market intelligence, behavioral insight, and a deeply relationship-driven approach to help organizations make leadership decisions with clarity and confidence.