When the Best Person for the Job Comes from Somewhere Else

When the Best Person for the Job Comes from Somewhere Else

International executive and former CHRO Athalie Williams on what cross-sector experience brings to organisations navigating complex change, and what it takes to make the transition work

There is a familiar comfort in the known candidate. When Australian boards and executive teams go looking for senior leadership, they tend to fish in predictable waters: sector insiders, functional specialists, people whose career histories map neatly onto the role being filled. It is a rational instinct. Shared context reduces onboarding friction. Industry knowledge signals credibility. The risk of a misjudged hire feels lower when the candidate’s background is legible.

But Athalie Williams, who has led complex organisational change across consulting, financial services, resources, and telecommunications, and across Australia, Asia, and the United Kingdom, thinks organisations are paying a price for that comfort they often don’t see clearly.

“The patterns of how organisations resist or embrace change are surprisingly consistent across sectors, countries, and business models,” she says. “Because humans are at the centre of large-scale change, and human behaviour presents itself in fairly predictable ways. Someone who has navigated that across genuinely different contexts often sees things that a sector insider, looking at their own industry, simply cannot.”

What cross-sector experience actually provides

What cross-sector experience offers organisations isn’t primarily about diversity for its own sake. It’s about what different experience genuinely equips a leader to do.

Leaders who have operated across industries carry something that is difficult to develop inside a single sector: the ability to recognise which problems are truly sector-specific and which are universal. Restructuring a workforce, rebuilding culture after a period of underperformance, integrating an acquisition, or navigating a major technology transition. These challenges share more DNA across industries than their surface differences suggest. A leader who has worked through comparable complexity in a different context arrives with pattern recognition that an insider may lack.

Williams points to her own grounding as instructive. Fourteen years as a management consultant at Accenture, working across financial services, telecommunications, health services, and resources in Australia and Southeast Asia, gave her a systematic lens for diagnosing business problems that she carried into every subsequent role. “I’ve always thought of myself as a business executive first,” she says. “That consulting foundation meant I approached every organisation with an enterprise-wide lens. What are the business outcomes you’re seeking to achieve? Not just the functional ones.”

That framing, business outcomes first and function second, is one that organisations navigating substantial change often need at senior levels and don’t always find in candidates whose careers have been spent entirely within one sector.

When organisations should look further afield

Cross-sector hiring isn’t always the right answer. There are leadership roles where deep industry knowledge is genuinely non-negotiable, where regulatory intimacy, technical expertise, or established stakeholder relationships are the core of the job. Mistaking those roles for ones where broader experience would be an advantage is its own risk.

But there is a category of challenge where the calculus shifts. When an organisation is facing the kind of inflection point that requires a fundamentally different way of thinking, a post-merger integration, a major operating model redesign, a cultural reset, a workforce transformation at scale, the instinct to hire from within the sector can actively work against the outcome being sought.

“Organisations that do change well invest in alignment early and treat transformation as a core leadership capability,” Williams says. “Sometimes the leaders best equipped to build that capability are the ones who have built it elsewhere, in genuinely different environments, under genuinely different pressures.”

The signals that a cross-sector search might be warranted are worth naming. If the internal and sector candidate pool keeps surfacing the same approaches to a problem that has resisted those approaches before, that is a signal. If the challenge ahead is one the organisation hasn’t faced before, a candidate who has faced its equivalent elsewhere may bring more than an insider with adjacent experience. If the board or executive team privately acknowledges that fresh thinking is needed but keeps shortlisting familiar profiles, the gap between what is being said and what is being done is worth examining directly.

What makes the transition work

Bringing in a leader from outside the sector creates its own conditions for success or failure. The track record in cross-sector moves suggests a few things matter most.

Credibility is established through questions, not assertions. Leaders who arrive from different industries and seek first to understand the regulatory environment, the competitive dynamics, the particular pressures that shape how people in that sector think, build trust faster than those who signal their transferable expertise before demonstrating genuine curiosity. Industry-specific knowledge can be acquired. The instinct to listen first is harder to teach.

Sponsorship from the top isn’t optional. Cross-sector hires who succeed almost always have a CEO, chair, or executive sponsor who understood what they were bringing in and was prepared to make the case for it internally during the period before the leader had built their own credibility. Without that, the unfamiliarity of the background becomes a liability that compounds.

The mandate needs to be clear and genuine. Bringing in someone specifically because they think differently, and then expecting them to conform to the prevailing logic of the sector, produces the worst of both options. If the reason for looking outside was that new thinking was needed, the organisation needs to be genuinely ready for it.

“I’ve seen organisations make the move and then resist the very thing they hired for,” Williams says. “Real change requires leaders who are willing to challenge the sacred cows. But it also requires organisations that are actually ready to have them challenged.”

For Australian organisations facing the pace and complexity of change that defines the current environment, the question of where to look for leadership is becoming more consequential. A broader search doesn’t mean sector experience doesn’t matter. In certain moments, though, the perspective that comes from having done hard things in genuinely different contexts may matter more.