It's Not the Right Person, It's the Right Fit

THE COUL & GOLD BRIEFING · ISSUE Nº 25 · 11 AUGUST 2026

“We have not found the right person yet.”

You have said this, or sat in a meeting where someone said it and nobody argued. It is a reasonable sentence, and it closes the subject, which is most of why it gets said.

Underneath it is an assumption doing a great deal of work: that somewhere out there is a person who would have held this seat, and the search has not reached them yet. Sometimes that is true. More often it is the least examined claim in the room.

Look at what the second search is built on. The first appointment was capable. The references were strong, the interviews were good, the first ninety days looked like the beginning of something that would work. Then it came apart, at roughly the same point and in roughly the same way that it will come apart for the next one, for reasons that were difficult to write down afterwards.

So the specification goes back out, adjusted a little for whatever the last one seemed to lack. Read it again before you send it. Seven years of experience, a certain kind of background, judgment, discretion, the ability to operate at pace. Every line describes a person in isolation. Not one line describes that person in relation to you.

That is the gap the sentence hides. You are searching for a person. What failed was a pairing.

There is a cost to that sentence which nobody sees, because it walks out of the building. The person who left carries the account that they could not do the job. Frequently they could. What they could not do was that job beside you, without conditions in place that nobody designed, because nobody had established they were needed.

There is also a test for whether this is your situation, and it is uncomfortable because it is so simple. One failed senior hire is a hire. Two failures in the same seat, different people, presenting the same way, is a pattern with only two possible owners. Either the seat is impossible as designed, or the combination was never viable and nobody read it before anyone was committed to it.

Those are the only two candidates left. Only one of them can be tested in advance.

Start with the word doing the damage.

Fit is the most abused term in senior hiring, because it usually means comfort. Did the conversation flow. Did they feel like one of us. Would you want them in the room at eight in the evening when something has gone wrong.

That is chemistry, and chemistry is a poor predictor. Two leaders who would not enjoy dinner together can be structurally well matched as working partners. Two who enjoy each other’s company can have operating patterns that generate accumulating cost from the first month. The second case is the more dangerous one, because everyone likes each other and so no one goes looking for a structural explanation when the work starts slipping.

Structural fit is a different question. Whether the specific combination of how you operate and how they operate produces a working structure. What does each of you provide the other that neither produces alone. What does each of your patterns cost the other. Under pressure, do your defaults compound or collide.

That question has an answer, and it is readable before the two people are committed to each other.

So the process tests what it was designed to test. You assess the candidate against the specification, and you assess whether you like them. What you never assess is the pair. The pair is not on the scorecard, because it was never in the brief.

Here is the mechanism in the concrete. Take a leader who holds decisions open late, revisits them as new information arrives, and treats a position taken on Tuesday as provisional until Friday. That is a legitimate operating pattern, and at its best it is what keeps an organisation from committing early to the wrong thing.

Now put beside them a counterpart who needs closure in order to act. A decisive one, whose value is that they take a decision and drive it through the organisation without further reference upward. That is also a legitimate pattern, and on paper it is exactly what you said you wanted.

The pairing will produce the following, reliably. The counterpart will move on Tuesday’s decision. It will change by Friday. They will spend a meaningful part of every week unwinding work they had already put into the organisation, and absorbing the credibility cost of having asked people to do something that then stopped being the plan. Within a year they will stop moving on Tuesday. They will wait. And the thing you hired them for, the ability to take something off your desk and land it, will have been trained out of them by the pairing rather than by any failure of their own.

The visible cost is the replacement: the search, the fee, the vacancy, the ramp. That number is knowable and it is the one that gets discussed.

The invisible cost is larger and it does not appear on any account. It is the year or more in which the pairing was generating friction that both people read as their own failing and managed privately. It is the decisions that arrived late because the route to you had become expensive to use. It is the second search running on the same specification that produced the first failure, which means the same result is already being purchased.

Where the cost lands is the part worth sitting with. It lands on the individual, in both directions — on the person who left, and on your own read of your judgment about people. It lands anywhere except on the specification, which is the only thing in the sequence that was actually wrong, and which is still sitting in a folder ready to be used again.

Reading structural fit in advance does not produce a verdict on whether two people should work together, and it should not be sold as one. What it produces is more useful than that.

It tells you where the combination holds — what this specific pairing produces that neither leader produces alone. It tells you where it will fracture, and by which mechanism, which is the part that lets you act. And it tells you what has to be in place for the partnership to work at the level the two patterns say is possible. Specific conditions, each one attached to a specific identified risk.

That last part is why this is worth doing before the commitment rather than after the failure. Friction identified in advance is a design problem, and design problems have solutions: an explicit protocol for what is provisional and what is settled, a defined escalation route, a named forum where the revisiting happens so it stops happening in the counterpart’s inbox. Friction discovered in the second year has stopped being a design problem. By then it has a history, and it has become personal for both of you.

The question is not whether the last person could do the job. Assume they could. The question is what your own operating pattern requires from the person beside you, whether anyone has ever established that in writing, and whether the specification you are about to use for the third search knows any of it.

— Suzi

If you are forming a senior pairing, reviewing one that is not working, or about to run a search for a seat that has already turned over once, that is the conversation we have built Fit & Friction for. It reads the partnership rather than the person: where it holds, where it fractures, and the conditions it requires. The scoping conversation is confidential, without obligation, and takes thirty to forty-five minutes.

One voice from inside the role. One from the blueprints. Same mission.