In Three Years, I’m Going to Fire You

Imagine accepting a senior leadership role and, in the same conversation, being told the date you will be let go.

Not as a threat. Not as a warning. As a feature of the offer.

That is exactly how one HR director I worked with used to transformational senior hires. 

After walking the candidate through salary, package, incentives, all the usual bits, she would lean in and say something close to this:

“In three years, we are going to fire you. It might be four. It will not be five. Because by then, the job we are hiring you to do will be done.”

It is one of the most honest conversations I have ever heard a hiring manager have. 

And I have never forgotten it.

Why She Did It

Her reasoning was straightforward. The role she was hiring for had a defined endpoint. A transformation. A specific piece of work that, if executed well, would reach a natural conclusion within a known window.

She knew that if she kept the person in role beyond that window, something predictable would happen. The natural human instinct would kick in. The leader would start tinkering. Adjusting. Refining things that did not need refining.

And in doing so, they would slowly undo the very work they had been brought in to deliver.

So she removed the temptation entirely. She told them at the start. The runway is finite. The reward will be substantial. We will pay you well, incentivise you properly, and look after you. But staying past the work being done is not the offer.

This Is Not Succession Planning. It Is Something Sharper.

Succession planning is about continuity. About developing the next leader so the business does not stumble when the current one moves on. Every serious organisation should be doing it, and most claim they are.

What this HRD was doing was different. She was designing the role with an expiry date built in. She was treating the leadership appointment less like a permanent fixture and more like a defined assignment with clear boundaries.

It is the difference between hiring a steward and commissioning a project.

Both are valuable. Both have a place. But organisations that conflate the two end up making expensive mistakes. They hire a transformation leader, get the transformation, and then quietly let that same person spend the next decade slowly diluting their own work.

The Loyalty Trap

Most boards struggle to do what this HRD did. And the reason is not strategic. It is emotional.

Letting a strong leader go after they have just delivered something significant feels wrong. 

It feels like a loss. 

There is also a quiet anxiety that letting talent walk out of the door is somehow a failure of culture. So instead, the leader stays. They get a new title. They get more responsibility added on. They get given areas they were never hired for in the first place.

And gradually, the clean lines of what they delivered get blurred. 

The new structures get complicated by their own desire to keep improving them. The processes get reorganised because reorganising is what active leaders do. The original purpose of the appointment fades.

It is not bad people doing bad work. It is good people doing the wrong work for too long.

What the Best Organisations Do Differently

The organisations I see handling this best build the lifespan into the brief from day one. 

They are upfront with candidates about the duration. They design reward structures around completion, not tenure. They reward people for finishing the work cleanly and moving on, rather than for staying just because staying is comfortable.

This requires real honesty from everyone in the room. From the board, who have to be willing to commit to a clear scope of work. From HR, who have to write contracts that match the reality of the assignment. And from the leader being hired, who has to accept that the role is the role, and that doing it brilliantly means handing it over when the time comes.

In my experience, the leaders who thrive under this kind of arrangement are precisely the ones you want for transformation work. They are the ones who do not need the role to define them. 

They have done it before. 

They will do it again. 

They are motivated by the work itself, not the seat.

Before Your Next Senior Appointment, Ask Yourself This

The bravest organisations are honest about lifespan from the very first conversation. The rest spend years quietly watching their best appointments unravel the work they were hired to deliver.

So here is the question to take to your next exec discussion.

Look at the senior leaders you hired specifically to drive change. How many of them are still in role two, three, five years after the change was complete? And how much of their original work is still intact today?

If the honest answer is uncomfortable, you may not have a hiring problem. You may have an exit problem.

---

This is part of the Behind the Scenes series, where I share observations from 20+ years of placing technology leaders into complex organisations. If this resonated, subscribe to stay in the loop.

If you are scoping a senior appointment with a defined transformation in mind, I’d welcome the conversation.