Show Up to Win: How to Land the Leadership Role You Want

To win top leadership roles, be as skilled at your job search as you are at your job.

Today, executive careers are more fluid than ever, and so is the executive job market. As an ambitious leader, you have no problem closing a deal or hitting your numbers, but knowing how to take the next step, the big step, will prove more difficult. To land a top job, you need to be clear about the distinct value you bring to the role you want. Yet the higher you rise, the harder it becomes to get honest opinions about your strengths and weaknesses.

In Show Up to Win, Kelly O. Kay and Jeff Sanders, partners at executive search and consulting firm Heidrick & Struggles, lay out a road map to help you win that top-level role and move into it effectively. Backed by a wealth of insights from real-life case studies and interviews, this straight-talking book shows what the job search looks like for today's senior-level candidates, what companies are looking for in candidates for their top jobs, and how you can identify and best position yourself to win the role they've defined.

Drawing on more than three decades of experience and two hundred conversations per week with Fortune 1000 companies about executive roles, the authors highlight unexpected perspectives and counterintuitive advice on what differentiates the candidates who land the best jobs from those who are overlooked because they fail to distinguish themselves at the highest levels.

The result is a deeply practical and timeless exploration of how you should think about and navigate a high-stakes executive job search.

Kelly O. Kay is managing partner, Global Enterprise Software and AI Practice at Heidrick & Struggles. He has served and led some of the biggest accounts in B2B software and specializes in senior go-to-market leaders. Jeff Sanders is vice chair and co-managing partner of the global CEO & Board of Directors Practice for Heidrick & Struggles. His primary focus is assisting high-impact companies with CEO and board succession.