Making Friends Along The Way
Why an executive search, done well, is an act of leadership rather than a campaign
By Savio Franco, PhD
There is an old Irish saying that a stranger is simply a friend you have not met yet. I have
spent twenty-six years building leaders and leadership ecosystems, twelve in multinational
corporate work and fourteen in higher education, most recently as the inaugural Director of
Leadership Learning at Johns Hopkins University. Through the executive searches I have
navigated in my own career, and alongside the many leaders I have mentored and coached
through searches of their own, that old saying has proven itself more reliable than any
strategy I know.
An executive search can be an isolating season: the timelines are long, the silences are
longer, and stretches of the road are walked alone. Honest counsel begins by naming that.
And this is precisely why the reframe of friendship earns its place.
Very often, when a professional transition arrives, we reach for the vocabulary of a
campaign. Targets, pipelines, positioning, outreach. The vocabulary is not wrong. It is
simply incomplete, and it leaves out the one thing that matters most.
Trust is the hard currency of professional life
An executive search is a practice of friendship. That is not a soft consolation for a hard
process. It is the most accurate description of how executive work actually changes hands.
Roles at this level are rarely filled by a stack of applications. They are shaped, sometimes
invented, in conversation between people who have decided to trust each other. Which
means the daily work of a search is not selling yourself. It is growing trust with people you
have only just met, and growing trust, in practice, looks and feels very much like friendship.
If friendship still sounds like soft language for something this consequential, consider that
the Stoics, the least sentimental thinkers in the Western canon, treated it as a serious
discipline. “You must live for another,” Seneca wrote, “if you wish to live for yourself.”
Friendship builds trust, and trust is the hardest currency in professional life. It moves
further than any resume, and it opens doors no credential can.
Friendship is a leadership discipline
We do not usually name it this way, but making friends and growing those relationships
over time is a leadership skill. It is built from the same practices that the field of leadership
development returns to again and again:
• Listening with full attention.• Being generous before being asked.
• Remembering what matters to the other person.
• Following through as soon as the moment allows.
In measuring the effectiveness of leadership development across organizations, I have found
that the same rigor applies to friendship. Prepare for every conversation as carefully as you
would for a C-suite or board presentation. Take notes. Close every loop. Thank people
thoughtfully. Friendship, like leadership, is mostly follow-through.
Be a go-giver
The transition literature tells executives to be go-getters. I have found more truth, and far
more joy, in being a go-giver. Arrive in every conversation with something in hand: a
perspective on a problem the other person is carrying, an introduction they would value, an
honest read on a question in your field. Some of the most substantive conversations I have
had recently, such as with senior leaders at an Ivy League academic medical center, a
massive integrated health system, and a global biotechnology company, began as generosity
in one direction and became generosity in both. One ended with a leader thinking aloud
about what I could contribute to a capability her institution might need to build next, and
then opening two more doors unasked. Go-getters ask for that outcome. Go-givers are
offered it.
And the interview process itself, so often experienced as an audition, is better understood as
a room full of potential professional friendships in the making. The recruiter, the panel, the
executive across the table, the receptionist: each is a person you may one day work beside,
and each deserves the care you would give a friend of long standing, whatever the outcome
of the search.
Pay the kindness forward
Here is what has humbled me most. Again and again, people who owed me nothing,
including the remarkable volunteers of The Job Forum community, have opened their
networks and their wisdom simply because someone they trusted asked them to. A kindness
like that cannot be paid back. It can only be paid forward. So I do for others what has been
done for me: I advise leaders navigating their own transitions, I make introductions of my
own, and I help those I mentor learn to read what matters most in any opportunity: the
culture of the organization and the managerial ethic of the person they would work for.
Paying kindness forward is not a tactic. It is character, practiced until it becomes second
nature, and it is how a professional network becomes a circle of friends.
Friendship, institutionalized
I have seen what happens when a community of kindred professionals takes everything I’ve
described above and turns it into an institution. The Job Forum, a nonprofit sponsored by
the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce for more than seven decades, is exactly that: the
go-giver principle, organized and sustained. Its volunteers are hiring managers and senior
executives. They listen to a career story and redraw the target list: employers a professional
had not considered, roles where they could fit and grow into leadership. They make senior-
level introductions to people who can make hiring decisions or refer a candidate onward,
and they follow through. There is nothing merely philosophical about any of it. It is
concrete, strategic, and persistent, and every professional it returns to good work
strengthens the workforce that fuels the region’s economy. If trust is the hard currency of
professional life, the Forum has been minting it for the Bay Area since the 1950s.
The measure that matters
A search measured only by its ending is mostly waiting. A search measured by friendships is
moving every week. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has followed lives for
more than eighty-five years, keeps arriving at the same finding: the quality of our
relationships is among the strongest predictors of our happiness and our health, and it is
what people treasure most when they look back across their lives. I have come to measure
wealth the same way. Titles change, and organizations change. The friendships remain.
So when a transition finds you, resist the campaign. Lead instead. Listen first, give first,
close every loop, and pay every kindness forward. The people whose paths intertwine with
yours along the way are not merely means to the destination. Looked at rightly, they are the
treasure we gather on the way to it, and on arriving we discover that the journey itself was
the reward.
Savio Franco, PhD, CPTD, SHRM-SCP, is a leadership development and talent strategy executive
who has built Leaderful organizations across corporate and higher-education settings, most
recently as the inaugural Director of Leadership Learning at Johns Hopkins University.
