Their clock started three quarters ago

Not as the person getting the news. As the one in the planning meetings, working through an organisational design in a spreadsheet, months before anyone affected by it knew it existed.

Nobody in those rooms was being cruel. That is the part people find hardest to believe when I describe it. It was budget, then structure, then sequencing, then legal review. Ordinary corporate process, done carefully, over quarters.

Let's dive in.

A budget gets reviewed in one quarter. A structure gets agreed in the next. The people in that structure hear about it a quarter after that.

By the time the meeting appears in your calendar, the work is finished. The modelling is done. The scenarios have been argued over and discarded. Everyone in the room has had months to get used to an outcome you are hearing for the first time.

Their clock started 3 quarters ago. Yours starts in the meeting.

And then your job search begins from a standing start.

At Director+ level, that search runs 9 to 12 months without structured support. With structured support, 5 to 7. Those figures are consistent across Challenger, Career Partners International and Crenshaw Associates.

So the difference is not a few weeks of unfairness. It is close to a year of your life, set by a calendar you never saw.

The sensible-sounding response is not to start looking until you know something concrete, then act decisively. Do not overreact to rumour. Do not start something you may not need.

I understand the logic. Almost everyone I speak to in this position followed it.

The problem is that it puts sensible things in the wrong order.

There are decent reasons people wait.

Starting your search early feels disloyal when you are in the middle of delivering something. It feels like conceding that the rumour is true. And there is a worry about being seen as the person who jumped at the first sign of trouble.

There is a second problem: the search you would run from a standing start is not the search that works at this level.

Between 70 and 85% of Director-plus roles are never publicly advertised. Referred candidates are around 7 times more likely to be hired. And 63% of senior candidates compete for 30% of the roles, because those are the roles they can see.

So what shortens a senior search is not effort applied in month one. It is market knowledge and relationships that already existed in month minus twelve.

You cannot build those quickly.

I spent years being measured on forecast accuracy. The standard I worked to was ± 1 - 5%.

You do not get to that number by looking harder at the current quarter. You get there by keeping a live view of things that have not happened yet, updated in small increments, so that when something moves you already know what it means. A forecast is never a document you produce. It is a position you maintain.

Every commercial leader reading this does exactly that for their business. 4 quarters out, revisited weekly, defended in front of a Leadership Team and/or a board.

And almost none of us do this for our own career. We forecast the business 4 quarters out and our own career zero quarters out.

That asymmetry is the whole problem.

There are 3 things worth having in place while you are still employed and still busy. None of them is dramatic. All of them are slow.

1. An honest, current read on what the market pays for what you do.

Not what you were worth when you last negotiated. What the market pays now, for your function, at your level, in your sector. Most senior people are working from a number that is 3 or 4 years old.

30 minutes, twice a year. Two executive headhunter conversations and one look at live roles at your level.

2. Five or six real conversations a quarter with people outside your organisation.

Real, meaning the other person would recognise your name in their inbox 6 months later. Not a connection request. Not a comment. An actual relationsihp building conversation.

5 or 6 a quarter is 24 a year. That is the difference between a network you can call and a contact list you have to introduce yourself to.

3. Your own numbers, well enough to say them out loud.

Monthly essential spend. Months of runway at that spend. The date at which pressure starts.

Severance for a Director or VP in the US typically covers 12 to 16 weeks. UK statutory redundancy caps at £21,570. Of course, more can be negociated but that is the baseline. Set either against a 9 to 12 month search and you can see why 40% of people who changed roles in late 2025 accepted pay cuts of more than 10%. The runway ran out before the right role turned up.

None of this is a job search. You can do every part of it while fully committed to the job you have, and I would argue your employer is better off with a version of you who is current on the market rather than 4 years behind it.

All 3 take months to build. All 3 take about 20 minutes a week to maintain.

You may never need any of it. The value is in what it costs you if you do need it and have not got it. Think of it as an insurance policy.

Reply to this email and tell me which of the 3 you actually have in place today. Most people have one, , and are surprised by which ones is missing. I would like to hear your version.

David