Two questions, always in this order. First, what is the challenge to be solved? Then, who truly fits it?
Shaped by fifteen years and more than a thousand executive conversations.
A capable executive, hired for a job the company did not actually need. The CFO who should have been a CBO. The full-time hire that should have been fractional. The new seat that hid a missing one. The hire succeeds on its own terms. The company still loses the phase. A flat round, a year of runway gone, a valuation the data did not deserve.
The right kind of role, the right CV, and six months in the person does not match the phase, the team, or the years the work takes. By month eighteen the search is running again, under pressure. A year of friction, a forced exit, a second search at the worst possible time.
A large firm runs a process built to fill the brief. The process is not built to question the brief. That is the first miss. The second is the filter itself.
Reads well at CV level. Reads poorly at the relational level. Not read at all at the level of fit with this specific team.
The stand-in for the relational read that never happened. Likability gets confused for fit. They are not the same thing.
The model rewards closing the search, not getting it right. It pushes toward the candidate the founder will accept quickly. Not the one the phase requires.
A capable hire, for a question no one asked. The miss compounds from there.
Each mistake comes from skipping a question. The wrong move comes from never asking what the challenge actually is. The wrong fit comes from never reading who truly fits it. So the method is two questions, asked in order, every time.
Read the phase before the candidate. Name the move that belongs to this phase, and the moves that do not. The wrong move is prevented here.
Read the person past the CV. Capability gets them hired. Whether the role keeps feeding them decides whether they stay outstanding for the years the phase takes. The wrong fit is prevented here.
Most founders arrive with the answer already chosen. We need a CFO. We need a CMO. The seat feels empty, so the plan is to fill it. The harder question, the one the phase is actually asking, gets skipped.
So I run a different question first. Not which seat is empty today. What will the next phase demand of the whole team, and who already here still fits it? A founder lives inside the phase they are in. That is exactly why the next one is hard to see from the inside. Seeing it is the part I am paid for.
Not a prescription. The shape of the leadership question that tends to surface at each phase. The actual question for any company is read by running the diagnostic.
Six patterns that tell me a leadership question is becoming active. Not yet which one. Catching them early is where companies are made or unmade.
Sixty minutes, one conversation, one-on-one. I read where the company actually stands. The phase. The configuration. The pressure point right now. Then I ask the questions the founder or the board has been circling, and the one they have been avoiding. The output is not a list of recommendations. It is a clear reading of which question this phase is actually asking, and what the next move is.
The diagnostic produces one answer: the right form of help for the phase. Sometimes a permanent hire. Sometimes not.
What it is never is "do nothing." A real problem brought you here. The question is which move, and in what form. Not whether to move at all.
When the diagnostic points to a hire, the second question takes over. A phase in biotech runs three to seven years. The read is not whether someone can start the job. It is whether they will do outstanding work across the whole arc. Two reads decide it.
Capability, in three layers: functional, relational, and the fit with this specific team. Standard search reads the first layer well. The other two are where most misfires begin. Capability gets a person hired. It does not keep them outstanding.
A CMO candidate. Fifteen years at a top-five pharma, three successful Phase 2 trials on her CV. The functional read is clean. In references, two former colleagues describe her as difficult with the FDA. Her last team had three director-level departures in eighteen months.
Standard search would place her. I do not. The relational layer is exactly the one the phase she would enter needs most.
The read standard search skips. Every executive is driven by two of six human needs: Certainty, Variety, Significance, Connection, Growth, Contribution. The question is which two dominate, and whether this phase actually supplies them. A role that starves a person's dominant need loses them, however strong the CV.
A CFO whose dominant drivers are Significance and Growth thrives on an IPO roadshow and starves through three years of quiet financial stewardship.
A CFO whose drivers are Certainty and Contribution thrives in steady governance and resists the improvisation a pivot demands.
Same CV. Same capability. Wrong phase. The drivers decide who stays outstanding over five years.
The method is not invented. It is shaped through application and sharpened through study. Three pillars.
Fifteen years in biotech executive search. More than a thousand executive conversations that ended in a placement. Four biotech cycles, watched end to end.
Tony Robbins' three questions for partnering and his six human needs, refined through years in his Mastery University and Business Mastery programmes. The trained reading of how a leader decides under pressure.
Self-determination theory from Deci and Ryan. Mindset from Carol Dweck. Organisational lifecycle and founder-transition research from Greiner, Adizes, Wasserman and Ibarra.
Three sources. One way of thinking. Applied one mandate at a time.
FAQ
The Rados Method is a thinking model for biotech leadership decisions. It asks two questions, always in the same order. First, what is the challenge to be solved. Then, who truly fits it. The first question reads the phase and prevents the wrong move. The second reads the person past the CV and prevents the wrong fit.
In one of two ways. The wrong move, when a capable executive is hired for a job the company did not actually need. And the wrong fit, when the role and the CV are right but the person does not match the phase, the team, or the years the work takes. Both are common, both are expensive, and both are diagnosable before anyone signs.
What is the challenge to be solved. It reads the phase before the candidate, names the move that belongs to this phase and the moves that do not, and prevents the wrong move. The answer can be a permanent hire, an interim or fractional executive, an advisor, or a replacement. It is never to do nothing.
Who truly fits it. It reads the person past the CV across two conditions. First, capability in three layers: functional, relational, and fit with the specific team. Second, whether the role keeps feeding the two human needs that dominate how the executive works, across the three to seven years a biotech phase takes.
By triangulation. The same pattern is read across three independent sources: the decisions the person has made over years, the emotional charge in how they describe those decisions, and references from people who watched them decide under pressure.
Three pillars. Fifteen years of biotech executive search and more than a thousand executive conversations. Leadership performance training, including Tony Robbins' work on human needs. And empirical research, including self-determination theory from Deci and Ryan, mindset research from Carol Dweck, and organisational lifecycle and founder-transition research from Greiner, Adizes, Wasserman and Ibarra.
If you want the reading run on your company, this is where it starts. I listen. You think out loud. The reading happens between us. No pitch.
If a move is due, we talk about whether I am the right person to make it with you. If it is not, you leave knowing what to watch for.
Book the conversation →Or write to christian@rados-recruiting.com.