The one quality that separates thriving care organisation leaders from struggling ones – and how to screen for it before you make the hire.
There’s a type of leader I’ve come to recognise over many years of executive recruitment. They’re experienced, they’re capable and on paper they look like exactly what the organisation needs.
They interview beautifully.
They speak fluently about vision, strategy and transformation.
The Board is impressed.
But then somewhere within the first few months, reality arrives. It might be a care management system so outdated its creating compliance risks. A rostering platform that doesn’t talk to payroll, leaving the finance team doing manual reconciliations every fortnight. A clinical governance framework that exists on paper but hasn’t been lived in years. Or a frontline workforce – carers, support workers, coordinators – who haven’t had a meaningful performance conversation in as long as anyone can remember.
That’s when you find out what a leader is really made of. Some will look at what’s in front of them, roll up their sleeves and get started. Other won’t, feeling like operational work is beneath the role they were hired for and wait for someone else to solve the problems for them. They rarely do – and the appointment that looked so promising on paper can start to unravel very quickly.
The difference between these two types of leaders isn’t experience or expertise, it’s something harder to measure – but essential to screen for.
Are you focusing too much on finding a ‘strategic’ leader?
Boards – especially in small to medium sized care organisations – are understandably eager to signal ambition. They want a strategic leader to take them to the next level. So the language of the role description and often the interview process itself, skews heavily towards vision and transformation. The operational reality gets mentioned as a footnote, if at all.
In large organisations, a CEO or COO can afford to operate at a high level – there are layers of experienced people below and alongside them handling the day-to-day. In the small to medium provider space, people at executive level are required to get involved in operations for at least the first six to 12 months. There’s no dedicated HR executive, no internal IT team and finance and legal functions are often fractional or outsourced. The leader who arrives expecting to set strategy from the boardroom can be in for a shock as they need to get into the weeds and sort out problems with their team first.
But a leader who is purely operational has limitations too. Without the higher-level strategic view, you sort the mess but never build anything. The organisations that thrive are the ones led by someone who can do both – and knows when to switch.
I call these people chameleon leaders.
What a chameleon leader looks like
Chameleon leaders can hold strategic and operational modes at once and move between them without ego or resentment. They understand the ground has to be prepared before anything meaningful can be built on it. They’ll sit with a frontline coordinator to understand why a system isn’t working at 4pm on a Friday, and walk into a Board meeting on Monday morning to present a strategic plan with clarity and conviction.
The leaders who navigate these environments well tend to have a genuine lightness about them. They have a sense of humour and don’t take themselves too seriously. They treat every person in the building – from the board chair to the cleaner – with the same respect. It’s more than just culture fit. It’s about character.
How to find your chameleon
Watch how they communicate early. From the first exchange, you’re already collecting data. Are they warm and grounded in how they write and speak? Or is there a stiffness, that suggests someone might be more comfortable performing leadership than actually doing it?
Take the interview out of the boardroom. A formal interview tells you how well someone can present. A coffee meeting tells you who they actually are. Unstructured conversation is where the honest, two way exchange happens – and where you find out whether this person is truly comfortable with rolling their sleeves up and getting involved.
Walk them around the site. How a candidate moves through a facility or offices – their body language, whether they engage with the people they pass, the questions they ask – is one of the most underused and revealing tools in executive selection.
Operational understanding is the springboard for strategic vision
The leaders who make the greatest long-term impact in this sector are the ones who are willing to do the hard, unglamorous work first. Who build the systems, steady the team, earn the trust of the board and create a vision from that solid base.
At PJ Recruitment & Executive Search, we specialise in finding chameleon leaders who thrive on both operational and strategic levels. If you’re looking for your next chameleon, we’d love to help.