January 2026 Newsletter
Burning Questions from the C-Suite
From a CEO: Should I hire externally or promote from
within?
I get asked this question a lot. Am I better off getting a Right Hand from the outside, or am I better off promoting someone internally?
This is a tradeoff question. Hereʼs what I mean.
Internal Promotion: Trust Now, Mastery Over Time
When you promote internally, you typically get a high degree of trust. You know the person. You have some assurance they’re aligned culturally. You’ve passed the get-to-know-you awkwardness. You understand how they treat people and how they operate inside your specific company. You don’t understand exactly how they’ll function in the new role, and that bears close vetting, but overall, you understand their identity better than if they were a stranger.
However, you’re usually also getting a skills gap. You’re giving someone an opportunity to grow, not hiring someone who has previously operated at this level. They have aptitude for the role but not experience in it. There are whole parts of the job that will be unfamiliar to them, and they won’t even know what they don’t know.
There’s nothing wrong with giving someone a chance so long as you understand what you’re committing to. When you promote internally, you’re signing up to teach. You will have to fill the skills gap intentionally with classes, mentoring, apprenticeship exercises, etc. You’ll be investing in training, coaching, and active development. If the company doesn’t have the expertise, time, and money to teach skills, you may be setting the person up for failure. If the role you’re filling is brand new and no one else at the company has ever seen it done well or done it themselves, you may do better with an outside hire who can teach you‘all what success looks like rather than turning to you for definition.
Another tradeoff is that you can’t let go of key parts of the job until you finish teaching those skills. For example, if I promote you to Controller when you’ve never done the role before, I will stay fully in charge of financial statement analysis for a couple years even if you help with it. I will be the one ensuring we have financial controls when it comes to spending, transaction approvals, closeout checklists, etc. Eventually you’ll know enough to take all those responsibilities from me, but if I hand them off too soon, the company will be at risk.
It doesn’t matter how much you trust a Right Hand if they don’t know how to do a function. Trustworthiness is not a substitute for knowledge.
External Hire: Mastery Now, Trust Over Time
When you hire externally, you usually get the opposite profile. The person has the skills. They have done this level of role before. They know how their function interacts with other functions, what specific processes need to be set up, and how to measure results. They’ve solved similar problems in other organizations. They’ve seen this movie.
But an external hire often comes with a trust gap. Not saying they are actually untrustworthy (hopefully they’re not!), just that they are unknown. You checked for value alignment, but still, you haven’t seen how they operationalize those values in daily life. You can vet for interpersonal skills and not know how someone will really act when things go wrong. You don’t know who they are as a person yet.
If you hire externally, you’re starting from scratch interpersonally. You’re opening your inner circle to someone new, and you will have to do the relationship work that entails. And you’ll have to show the new hire how things actually work at your company—not just the org chart, but the unwritten rules.
The time you spend with an external hire will be on building trust and teaching/modeling cultural literacy, not on skills training. That’s the tradeoff.
What to do?
Both paths can work. Both can fail. And both require effort. The diagnostic question is this: Will you and your company be better at filling the skills gap or the trust gap?
Famous Right Hands
The longtime Utah Jazz duo of John Stockton and Karl Malone is one of the most successful pairings in NBA history.
Stockton and Malone’s basketball partnership shows that high performance is not about two people doing the same thing well, but about two people doing different things in sync. Stockton was not the main scorer, and Malone was not the on-court strategist, but each trusted the other completely to do his job. The parallel for leadership might be a CEO who sets vision and direction paired with a Right Hand who handles execution. Stockton and Malone's success came from a strong understanding of where their responsibilities connected and a willingness to back each other up when it mattered most.
They also had mutual respect and a shared focus on results rather than control. Malone famously accepted in-game direction from Stockton, which is rare for a superstar, because he trusted Stockton’s judgment and intent. In the same way, effective CEOs trust their Right Hand to challenge, redirect, or refine execution without ego on either side. When the CEO can rely on their Right Hand to strengthen their direction and both are aligned on purpose, decisions move faster, second-guessing drops, and performance improves through steady, trusted collaboration.
Source: Basketball Network, From Way Downtown, SLC Tribune
News
We’re excited to share the preliminary title of Heather’s upcoming book: Winning Together: How CEOs and Right Hands Build a Relationship That Works.
The book explores reasons why a Right Hand relationship can be challenging, and it offers practical tools to help. Designed for both CEOs and Right Hands—whether in long-standing collaboration or new partnership—it is full of real-life examples and actionable insights. We teach a structural solution that doesn’t require you to change your personality in order to succeed at Right Hand relationships.
We’re planning an early Spring release, so stay tuned for updates and exclusive sneak peeks in the weeks ahead.
Invitation: To share a Right Hand experience for the book, please reply to this email or use this calendar link to book a short call with Heather.
Can We Help?
At Practical PhD, we help companies Get the Right Hand Right so they're ready for top leadership transition in 1–3 years:
Find and hire a Right Hand
Onboard a new Right Hand
Teach an aspiring Right Hand the job
Performance-manage a struggling Right Hand
Create a phased leadership succession plan
Click here to book a free consult.