Number 1 in the Series
Status quo or change agent? You’re asking the wrong question first. Your board should be asking what success looks like to your agency.
Note: This is the first article in a four-part series from TransPro’s executive search practice on what transit Boards should complete before launching an executive search—the work that can determine whether a new leader simply fills a vacancy or changes an agency’s trajectory.
By John Lewis, Principal
Every transit board that has run an executive search has had the same debate. Status quo or change agent? Insider or outsider? How many years of experience, what leadership style, the right vision, the right ethics, the right fit with the culture?
These are reasonable questions. They’re also, by now, a script, and scripts produce predictable outcomes. A board spends months weighing familiar attributes against each other, hires someone to find candidates who fit the mold, makes an offer, and then discovers 18 months later that the agency is no better off than before.
Here’s the uncomfortable part: the problem usually isn’t that the board asked the wrong questions about the candidate. It’s that the board never asked the harder question about itself.
Before you can evaluate who should lead the agency, you must answer something most searches skip entirely: what does success actually look like over the next three years, and does everyone on the Board agree?
It sounds obvious. It rarely is. Ask five Board members to define success and you’ll often get five answers: ridership growth, budget stability, labor peace, safety metrics, a capital project delivered on time. None of them is wrong. But an executive hired without a shared definition of success is set up to fail no matter how talented they are, because they’ll spend their tenure managing five conflicting expectations instead of executing one coherent strategy.
The best Boards treat the search itself as the forcing function for this conversation, not something to paper over. Over the next few issues of this newsletter, I’ll walk through what that pre-work actually looks like, and why the Boards that do it are the ones whose searches change the trajectory of the agency.
This pre-work begins with a simple question: could your Board members, asked separately, define success the same way?
TransPro’s Board Workshop helps transit Boards build alignment on agency direction and what real success looks like. It’s essential preparation for a CEO search, but it’s just as valuable for a Board that simply wants to lead more cohesively through today’s challenges.
The best CEO searches start before the job description. When your Board is ready to do that work, contact John Lewis at john.lewis@transproconsulting.com to get started.
Media Contact: Natalie Cochran at natalie.cochran@transproconsulting.com
