It is a scene all too common to executive search leads. A few months into a CEO search, if the process has not been carefully managed or facilitated, committee members can start to lose energy and the stages lag. This is typically when two finalists enter the frame. One is a known quantity with a recognizable name on their résumé, one that's a bigger version of the organization looking to hire. The other finalist is sharper on the specific challenges ahead, but they do not come with the brand-name pedigree. Because the first candidate feels like a responsible choice, everyone exhales.
Eighteen months later, that board is searching again.
I have watched this pattern repeat across enough searches to believe it is not bad luck. The problem is that boards are more likely to make some of their worst decisions precisely when the stakes are highest. Under pressure, decision makers quietly change their objective. Instead of optimizing for the best outcome, they start optimizing for the most defensible one. And in a crowded room at the end of a long process, safe and defensible feel like the same thing, even when they aren’t.
The recognizable candidate is defensible by definition. No one would second-guess the board for hiring the person everyone has heard of. If that leader fails, the board can say it did everything right. The less-familiar candidate carries no such cover, and choosing that person means the committee would personally be on the hook for a judgment call. So the incentive, felt in the body more than argued out loud, tilts toward the option that shields the decision makers.
This is not a character flaw. It is what happens when consequential decisions get made without a feedback loop.
Most boards hire a chief executive once every five or more years, and it is impossible to develop expertise around a decision made that infrequently. So boards borrow a proxy. The most available one is reputation, which focuses on elements like the brand on someone’s résumé, the size of the last organization they led and the names of the people who vouch for them. Reputation is a valid signal about a person's past, but it is easily mistaken for a guarantee about the future. When you have no internal instrument for judging fit, an external logo starts doing the work that discernment should be doing.
Add a committee, and the pull intensifies. The recognizable candidate is the path of least resistance in a room full of people trying to reach consensus. Disagreement is friction, so the option who is easiest to agree on will win over the option who is best suited for the job.
Most executive mis-hires are failures of alignment, not competence. And the organization pays for them twice. The first cost is time. A well-run executive search takes, in my experience, roughly 23 weeks from launch to a signed offer. A misfire means eating that stretch again—close to half a year, twice, on a single seat—plus the vacancy or interim period bridging the gap. That is the better part of two years, during which the most consequential role in the organization is either empty, temporary or occupied by someone who will not last. No board would knowingly budget for that. But it approves that scenario every time it mistakes a defensible name for a durable fit.
The second cost is what a good process is actually capable of, and what a defensive one throws away: fit. Being able to discern fit is the exact discipline that defensibility short-circuits. The safe hire isn't just risky in the abstract; it forfeits the retention and success rates a rigorous search reliably produces.
Slow, familiar and defensible are not the same as careful. They only look that way from inside the room.
The fix is not to swing toward risk for its own sake. It is to stop letting defensibility masquerade as safety. A few practices force the distinction into the open:
Define the job before you look at the names. Ask the committee to write down what the organization actually needs—the specific challenges of the next two years—before a single résumé is opened. Decouple the decision from the reputations.
Interrogate the phrase "safe choice" every time it appears. Say it out loud. Safe for whom—the organization or the committee?
Build a process the big name can lose. If your search has no mechanism that could eliminate a recognizable candidate on the merits, you do not have a search. You have a rubber stamp with extra steps.
The real risk with an executive search is never the unfamiliar candidate. It is mistaking a name you recognize for a decision you can stand behind. The most careful boards I know do not choose the safe option. They decide what safe actually means, then they go find it.
Christina Greenberg is CEO of Edgility Search where she supports executives and boards with leader transitions, governance and evaluation.