Insights

The Uncomfortable Truth: Leadership Roles Have Evolved

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How Can Search Committees Keep Up?

JULIE SCHRODT
MANAGING DIRECTOR

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Many industries have a version of the same problematic assumption baked into their executive searches: that the right candidate’s experience will resemble the last several people who held the role.

A recognizable career path. A familiar title. A résumé that looks as expected.

While that approach might work when the role is stable, it becomes a liability when the role evolves faster than the criteria used to evaluate it. And it’s a limiting perspective, perhaps preventing creativity and problem solving.

Across industries, the gap between the evaluation criteria and the leader required is widening.

This gap is showing up in nonprofit leadership, higher education, and college athletics, and any field where technology, capital structures, or regulation have evolved faster than the leadership profile. The uncomfortable truth is that many leadership roles have changed, but the skills required are not always clear to those doing the hiring.

When the Role Changes

College athletics amplifies this pattern, making it a practical, real-time example for exploration. The conventional path to a senior athletics leadership role involved rising through the coaching ranks followed by program administration, and eventually, for those best suited, leading the program as the Athletic Director. The traditional Athletic Director position was centered on relationships, institutional politics, and program-building. That job still exists, in part, but the skills needed for the top position in college athletics have evolved to include revenue diversification, capital partnerships, facility financing, and risk management at a scale most athletics departments didn’t need a decade ago.

The role now requires managing and understanding commercial negotiations, athlete compensation, media rights, capital planning, and financial stewardship. The responsibilities have outpaced the leadership pipeline, and oftentimes these are capabilities developed outside the realm of traditional athletics.

We commonly see these skillsets in leaders in private equity who structure complex investments, media executives who negotiate high-value agreements, and even commercial real estate leaders who manage long-term capital projects under financial constraints. We also see these skillsets in professional sport front-office leaders who have substantive expertise in personnel management and negotiating with legal entities and player agents. The question is not whether these experiences are relevant. It is whether those in the position to select candidates recognize the need for them and can see their value when they appear in “nontraditional” candidates.

The domain experience is still not optional. Reading a locker room, understanding politics surrounding student athletes, and navigating relationships built over years of institutional presence can’t be replaced by an outside résumé, no matter how impressive. The traditional archetype in college athletics has been doing double duty, standing in for both domain-specific operations and complex revenue-generating expertise, when those are two distinct capabilities that need to be evaluated separately.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Consider two finalists, side by side, competing for a senior athletics role. One résumé shows a career spent entirely inside college athletics, first coaching, then administration, and then on to a senior operations title. The other shows a career in media rights negotiation and commercial real estate finance, with no athletics title anywhere on it. Using the long-standing, unspoken rubric, the first profile is the safe choice while the second would be considered a risk, if the second candidate is considered at all.

Under a traditional evaluation framework, the first candidate is scoring all the points.

A different evaluation framework asks different questions: Which candidate has negotiated complex commercial agreements? Managed significant capital investments? Led through transformation? Which gaps can realistically be addressed through onboarding, experienced deputies, and governance?

The answers may lead to a different conclusion, one that wasn’t obvious at the start.

Neither candidate is automatically the right choice. But one is being evaluated for the job that lies ahead instead of what the role has historically been. That distinction comes down to one question: Which parts of this job can be learned, and which capabilities must already exist on day one?

The Hidden Constraint

The job title and description are often where the gaps are first observed. A familiar job title does a lot of quiet work, while a position description lets a committee repurpose language, assumptions, and evaluation criteria from years ago that may miss key evolutions of the job. The same title also shapes what candidates believe the job requires before they ever read the description, sometimes even narrowing who applies.

Smaller organizations often assume the evolution of the role doesn’t apply to them because they associate the complexity with larger institutions. But the underlying pressures—be it financial, technological, regulatory, etc.—tend to show up well below the largest and most visible organizations in a sector. We often observe this discrepancy with outdated rubrics that are just as risky at a mid-market company as at an industry leader. It’s also one we have come across in athletics where the impact is most visible at a Division I Power Four school, but the same considerations must apply to Division II and Division III institutions, and even the hiring of high school athletic directors.

The size of the organization changes the scale of the search. It does not change the size of the risk, or the challenge of a title and job description that no longer match the position.

Across Industries

The same challenge repeats itself wherever an industry is undergoing a quiet transformation faster than its leadership pipeline has adjusted.
Nonprofit leadership often reveals this pattern.

Boards experiencing funding pressure might prioritize hires with fundraising experience, even as many organizations might benefit from leaders who can identify ways to diversify revenue, build strategic partnerships, and introduce new operating models.

A title or career path that reliably predicts success stops being a dependable predictor the moment the underlying job changes, and the job description is often the last thing to catch up.

Organizations that define success by yesterday’s experience might inadvertently narrow their options before the search even begins. Those who focus on where they are headed broaden the field by identifying leaders whose experience aligns with what they are becoming.

Throughout the search process, industry experience should remain an important consideration, but it should not become the defining one. The most successful executive leadership appointments often come from leaders whose capabilities match the organization’s future, even when their careers unfolded in an atypical manner.

The most effective searches do not ask for a carbon copy of the previous leader’s experience. They determine what experiences might make the next leader best equipped for the next chapter.

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AUGUST 25, 2026

Julie Schrodt is a Managing Director at DSG Global with more than a decade of higher education experience, with the last five years as a senior executive search advisor.