Formation
Seed, preclinicalVariety2nd top need
My method for selecting executives and board members who stay, perform and make the right calls. It checks three fits: skill fit, stage fit and need fit. I was the first to bring stage fit and need fit into executive search, because when the stage and the person fit, leaders make better decisions.
My bold statement: getting stage fit and need fit right is the single biggest factor in biotech success that you can influence.
Investors, executives, founders: you obsess over the science, the funding and the timeline. Each of those is decided by a person in a seat. A CV tells you what that person can do. Stage fit and need fit tell you what they will actually do once they're in the seat. Five things change.
They run at full energy, because the seat feeds what drives them.
They stay through the stage, not just the first six months.
They set a tone that brings in the right people and keeps them.
They change course when the data say so, instead of defending last year's plan.
They make the big calls the stage needs. Which program, which patients, how much money, when to stop.
The one thing you can't control is the asset.
The science has to be right and the mechanism of your molecule has to work, and no hire changes that. Everything else you can control: performance, retention, culture, adaptability and the big calls. All five depend on whether the person fits the stage and the role feeds what drives them.
Nice CV, nice chat, nice feeling. Twelve months later you're hiring again. The CV got them into the room. It didn't get them through the next stage.
I create better leadership hires in biotech and help save lives. Years of placing leaders, permanent, interim and fractional, taught me one thing: how to make different hiring decisions.
When the stage of the company is aligned with the person's needs and values, you get more energy, better performance and better results.
Most executive searches still select on skill and chemistry. That's picking a player without knowing how the team plays.
Delayed trials, blown budgets, deals that fall apart six months in. Trace any of them back and you land on one seat, and the calls made from it.
Investors and executives obsess over science, funding and timelines. Fair enough. Every one of those is decided by a person in a seat.
You can't fix the asset. You can pick who leads it: someone wired to make the right calls at this stage, change course when the data say so, and stay when it counts.
Get it right and you don't just fill a seat. You decide how the next two years go.
You can't change the asset. You can choose who leads it.
Skill fit is the foundation every serious search covers. Stage fit and need fit are where hires succeed or fail, and where the method is different.
Expertise, experience, track record. Every serious search checks it, and so do I, on every candidate. It gets someone into the room.
The company side. What does this role demand at this stage of the company? An early-stage biotech is volatile, fast and full of unknowns. It needs a leader who runs on variety.
The person side. What are the top two needs that drive this executive? They stay remarkably constant over a career. Not a personality test. A structured interview about the choices they made.
Skill fit decides who gets into the room. Stage fit and need fit decide what happens after.
First, the company.
The company side. What does this role demand at this stage of the company? Every stage changes the job. An early-stage biotech is volatile, fast and full of unknowns, so it needs a leader who runs on variety. A company heading into Phase 3 needs one who runs on predictability.
Early stages feed variety. Late stages feed predictability.
Take one seat and walk it through the stages. A CEO in Formation, seed money in the bank: the week is the lab, a pitch deck, the first scientist to hire and a grant application, all before lunch. That seat feeds variety, and it feeds recognition, because everything that happens has their name on it. Four years later, Series B, Inflection. Same title, same business card. The week is now a partnering deal with two pharmas at the table, a Phase 2 that has to answer the question the next round will ask, a board that wants a decision on which program goes first, and a round in the high double-digit millions to close. Nobody changed the job description. The stage changed the job.
Why does the seat flip towards predictability? Because the stakes and the headcount change what a good week looks like. At seed, a surprise is a result. At Series B, a surprise is a deviation. There are sixty people instead of six. A Phase 2 protocol that regulators and a pharma partner will hold you to. A quality system, auditors, and investors who want the monthly numbers to match the plan. The money is bigger, so one wrong call costs the program, not a quarter. The CEO wins this stage by making things predictable: the trial recruits on schedule, the data package is clean, the board hears no surprises. That seat feeds predictability, and it starves variety. Someone who runs on predictability loves that week. Someone who runs on variety gets bored by it, and starts creating surprises of their own.
That's stage fit, and it's the company side: before I look at a single candidate, I work out what this seat will feed over the next two years, and what it will starve.
Early stages feed variety, late stages feed predictability. That's why the CEO who built the company rarely scales it. The second need comes with the role.
Then, the person.
The person side. What are the top two needs that drive this executive's behavior, motivation and decisions? Not a personality test. A structured interview about the choices they made: the jobs they left, the offers they turned down, the moment their energy dropped.
Two of these six drive every person. Which two, and whether the stage keeps feeding them, is what I find out before you hire.
The real power comes when you match those needs to what the company's current stage can actually feed. If the stage doesn't meet them, frustration builds, engagement drops and performance suffers.
A CEO driven by variety in a phase that demands stability and repeatability feels the tension every week. Put the same CEO in a stage full of new problems and they thrive, stay energized and drive the company forward.
Need fit isn't a nice-to-have. It's a critical lever for leadership performance and retention: a partnership where leader and company fuel each other.
I studied the research on why some hires last and others don't, looking for a way to make long-term matches reliable. The answer came from an unusual place: the work of family therapist Cloé Madanes and Tony Robbins. They resolve conflicts in families, couples and companies, and they explain them the same way. Conflict starts when people stop getting their top needs met. What lasts is what keeps feeding the top two needs on both sides.
Hiring an executive is the same decision. Skill gets someone through the interviews and the first six months. Need fit decides whether they stay, perform and make the right calls once the honeymoon is over. Most hires that fail, fail there, and they fail quietly.
I use plainer words for two of the six: predictability for certainty, recognition for significance.
Around 30 candidates. Skills 100% aligned.
Typical numbers, not one search. A board member has to help the CEO decide, so I drop the ones who need the spotlight for themselves. 5 left for the short list.
Miss stage fit or need fit, and nothing happens. At first. That's what makes it expensive.
This is what a hire on CV alone looks like over time. Right on paper, great in the room. Then the seat stops feeding what drives them, and nobody says it out loud.
The damage?
A year or more, in the stage that was supposed to be the fast one.
Six months of a leader fading while everyone pretends not to see it. Three to six months to run the search again. Six months until the next person is up to speed. And the next round negotiated with a hole in the team. Four of ten executive hires end like this, inside 18 months.
The leader who looked perfect on paper. Then the energy dipped, decisions slowed, and a year later you were writing a farewell post on LinkedIn. Nobody did anything wrong. The seat just stopped feeding them.
Four cases. Three that went wrong, and one that shows what planned looks like.
Three I've seen go wrong. One that was planned right.
A biotech brings on a board member with a big name and a bigger network. What drives him is recognition. The company needs someone driven by contribution, someone who helps the CEO decide. A few months in, every board meeting turns into a vote on whether he was right. When the company doesn't do exactly what he says, he announces he doesn't want to work with them anymore. The cost isn't just a lost board member. The CEO starts second-guessing every decision to avoid the next fight, and investors notice when a big name leaves early.
A first in human company hires a CMO who ran huge late-stage programs at a big pharma company. Impressive. But there's no team to delegate to. The CMO writes protocols, chases CROs and answers investor questions every week. If what drives them is predictability, this role starves them. The energy drops, decisions slow down, and a trial that needed speed gets meetings instead.
A company wants a CFO with an investor rolodex and Nasdaq experience. Sounds great. But the real work for the next two years is accounting processes, an ERP rollout and harmonizing entities. The CFO is excellent, and bored stiff. No roadshows, no deals, no spotlight. He either builds structures the company can't afford yet, or he's gone in 18 months. And the company paid a public-company salary for work a strong financial manager would have done better, and stayed for.
Jan de Kerpel of Van Lanschot Kempen brought this one up when I had him on Willing to Win. 2023, Karen Massey joins Argenx as COO. 2026, she becomes CEO and co-founder Tim Van Hauwermeiren becomes chairman. The stage changed from building to running a commercial company, and the person for that stage had been in the building for three years. Jan calls it the blueprint. Succession planned, not forced. Hear the conversation
The three who left were not bad hires on paper. Every one had the CV, the references and the right title. What they didn't have was a stage that needed what they bring, and a role that fed what drives them.
Hire the wrong person and you've signed up for a delayed trial, a blown budget and a deal that falls apart six months later. Get both fits right and you get five things at once.
Leaders who show up switched on, because the seat feeds what drives them.
They stay through the stage, not just through the first six months.
They set the tone that brings in the right team and keeps it.
They grow with the company instead of becoming the square peg at the next stage.
The big calls match the stage you're in. Which program, which patients, how much money, when to stop.
Skills can be taught. Strategy can change. What drives a person, and whether the stage feeds it, is set before day one. That's what the call is about.
Christian Rados, Rados Recruiting GmbH, Munich.
That's 2010. It leaves too many unknowns.
People don't show or articulate their needs on purpose. Not in an interview, not over dinner.
In their actions. In the reasons they did something, and the reasons they didn't.
Skill tells you what someone can do. Chemistry tells you that you like them. Neither tells you whether this seat, at this stage, will keep feeding what drives them. That's the unknown that costs you 18 months later.
of founders are no longer CEO three years in. Most of them didn't leave by choice.Noam Wasserman, Harvard
The founding CEO is rarely the commercial CEO.
Jan de Kerpel, Van Lanschot Kempen, on Willing to Win. Read the conversation
Raise your hand now and drive the leadership question yourself. Or someone else will drive it for you.
Achim Plum, HTGF, on Willing to Win
The surprising part is why founders leave. Usually not because they failed. Wasserman found the opposite: once a founder has led the company through its most important task, the chance of being replaced goes up a lot. The science works, the money comes in, and suddenly the CEO job asks for something else. Processes, structure, a commercial engine, a room full of investors. The stage changed. And often the role stopped feeding what drove the founder in the first place.
What does this role demand at this stage of the company?
What are the top two needs that drive this person, and does the stage feed them?
CEO. CFO. CMO. Interim. Fractional. Board member. Chair.
I select every leader this way. Only the answers change. A first in human company needs an executive who rolls up their sleeves. A board needs someone who helps the CEO decide. That's why contribution has to be one of a board member's top two needs.
A test tells you what someone is like. I look at what drives someone, because that drives what they do.
What's the worst thing that can happen to a biotech, apart from the asset failing? And where's the biggest factor you could have influenced, or prevented?
No doubt: a decision an executive made, or the way an executive behaved.
Look at the four cases above. The board member who turned every meeting into a vote on himself. The big pharma CMO whose trial got meetings instead of speed. The CFO who got bored and built structures nobody needed yet. And Argenx, where the right person for the next stage was already in the building. Every one of them is a decision or a behaviour, not a missing skill. The top two human needs of a person drive their behaviour, their decisions and how they show up. That's what I read for.
| Personality tests | The Rados Method | |
|---|---|---|
| What it measures | Traits. How someone is wired. | Drivers. The two needs behind their decisions. |
| Where the data comes from | A questionnaire the candidate fills in, knowing it's a test. | Decisions with a price. Jobs they left, offers they turned down, the moment their energy dropped. |
| Can it be gamed? | Yes. Senior people know what the test wants to hear. | Hard. You can't rewrite the choices you already made. |
| Does it know your company? | No. The test has no idea what stage you're in. | Yes. It starts with your stage and what the seat has to feed. |
| What it predicts | How they tend to work, in general. | Whether they stay, perform and make the right calls in the next 18 months. |
| What you do with it | Put it in the file. | Make the hire, or don't. |
Which job they left, and what they gave up to leave it. Which offer they turned down. When their energy dropped, and what changed right before. That's not theory. That's their track record, read for the right thing.
| Year | Who | What they showed | Backs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Gavin Slemp, Richard Ryan and colleaguesJournal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2024 | The largest review yet: 881 samples, over 440,000 people. Where people's core needs are supported, well-being is clearly higher, and performance is higher too. | Need fit |
| 2023 | Amy Kristof-Brown, Benjamin Schneider, Rong SuPersonnel Psychology, 2023 | Decades of fit research, reviewed. Does fit between a person and their work matter? Quite a bit, especially for how people feel about the job and whether they leave. | Both fits |
| 2016 | Anja Van den Broeck and colleaguesJournal of Management, 2016 | A review of 99 studies on core needs at work, built on Deci and Ryan's Self-Determination Theory. Needs met at work go hand in hand with motivation and well-being. | Need fit |
| 1989 to 2016 | Baumeister and Leary, Webster and Kruglanski, Anderson, González-Cutre, Martela and Ryan, RyffPsychological Bulletin, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and others | Each of the six needs has its own line of research: connection, predictability, recognition, variety, contribution, growth. | The six needs |
| 2018 | Michael Ewens, Matt MarxReview of Financial Studies, 2018 | Nearly 12,000 venture-backed startups. Bringing in a new leader in place of the founder raises the odds of an IPO or a strong acquisition. Causal evidence, not just correlation. | Stage fit |
| 2003 | Noam WassermanOrganization Science, 2003; Harvard Business Review, 2008 | Founder-CEOs get replaced right after their biggest wins: product finished, new round raised. By year three, half of founders are no longer CEO. | Stage fit |
| 2022 | Paul Sackett and colleaguesJournal of Applied Psychology, 2022 | A century of hiring research re-checked. The best predictor of performance is the structured interview. | How I work |
I was the first to bring stage fit and need fit into executive search. The research behind them isn't new.