The layer that decides performance: why middle leadership hires matter more than boards think
By Rob Pegg · July 2026
Boards obsess over director hires and pay search fees to match, then hand the resulting strategy to a layer of general managers and heads of function hired in three weeks through a job board. Having run large operations, I would argue that ordering of attention is exactly backwards more often than anyone admits.
Where performance actually lives
Strategy fails or succeeds in the daily grind: shift handovers, agency spend decisions, the conversation a GM has when service slips, whether the planning team is respected or ignored. That is middle leadership territory. A strong director with weak GMs delivers a well-articulated plan that never happens. Strong GMs under an average director will often quietly outperform the plan anyway.
The cost of getting it wrong is disguised
A failed director hire is visible and embarrassing, so it gets attention. A mediocre GM is invisible on any single day. The damage arrives as a slow leak: a few points of margin in agency cover, attrition that is always explainable one leaver at a time, service that is never quite bad enough to trigger a review. Add it up over a year and it routinely dwarfs the cost of the director mistake everyone was so careful to avoid.
Why generalist recruitment gets this layer wrong
Middle leadership is the hardest layer to assess from a CV. Titles are inconsistent between businesses, achievements are collective, and the difference between someone who ran a site and someone who was present while a site ran itself does not show up in keywords. Assessing it requires knowing what the job actually involves, which is why this layer is where sector-outsider recruitment fails most reliably.
What to do differently
Treat GM and head-of-function hires with the same seriousness as director hires: a proper brief, realistic market pricing, structured assessment against the operation itself, and references that ask about the numbers, not the personality. And when you find good ones, develop them, because your next operations director is far more likely to be a GM you grew than a stranger you searched for.
The boardroom sets the direction. The middle sets the pace. Hire accordingly.