Before You Scan One More Job Posting: How to Drive Your Senior Leadership Transition
by Arthur Fleischmann, Principal Sense.Maker, and Fabiana Pereira Hotz, CEO, Claristrat Institute
For many, the creeping dread starts on Sunday afternoon. There comes the silent, bodily awareness that the game you've been playing extremely well has somehow stopped being worth winning. When this happens, standard modern comforts fall short. No amount of Uber Eats will fix it. Neither will scrolling through job postings. But that's usually where most executives go first. Open a tab. Start scanning. New company. New title. New chapter.
The instinct makes sense. The open tab is the most available answer, and availability is easy to mistake for accuracy.
Quick availability rarely delivers what you are actually looking for.
We ran a webinar on career transitions recently. Before we said a word, we asked participants what was holding them back from making their next move. Most common answer, by a wide margin: "seeking the right opportunity." Second: "don't know what I want." Those are not two problems. They are one. If you don’t know what you want, the right opportunity could walk up, introduce itself, and you would still not recognize it.
A 2025 Deloitte C-Suite Barometer found that 76 percent of senior executives report burnout, exhaustion, or significant stress. The average age for a professional career change is 39, right in the middle of what should be a peak decade. The near-universal first response is to scan job postings. But a new job does not close the gap between who you have become and how your organization needs you to show up. It relocates the gap.
The more useful conversation, which few take the time to have, is about the person doing the pivoting.
This is the work Arthur Fleischmann and Fabiana Pereira Hotz guide senior leaders through in their leadership transition work: getting leaders like you clear on three things before you touch your LinkedIn headline. You can call it the VVP framework, for Vocation, Values, and Posture. Or the “Who Before the What”.
V for Find Your Vocation: The Work You Did Before Anyone Paid You
Here is a word that does not come up enough in career conversations: vocation. In the older, more useful sense, it means what you are called to do, rather than what you were trained to do. Fabiana describes vocation as the work you did before anyone paid you for it. The compulsive, physical pull toward a certain kind of activity, driven by an inner drive you could not explain or help. Your whole body in it. Not because someone asked or found it commendable. Just because. Here is what makes this more than philosophy.
Vocation follows you through your career uninvited.
Three examples from Fabiana's client files:
The salesperson who was always running charitable fundraising on the side. Unpaid. Unasked. Relentlessly.
The senior tech consultant closing eight-figure deals who spent his evenings connecting people to jobs they were not fully qualified for on paper, because he could see the fit crystal clearly when others could not.
The account director who built employee communities at every company she joined, whether it was in her job description or not. (It never was.)
None of these leaders were paid for those activities. Each of them did those repeatedly and regardless. Looking at what you also kept going back to is how you can find the common denominator beneath all your job titles, across every role, every company, every phase: that recurring pattern is the vocation. It tends to be deceptively simple. Problem-solving. Building community. Creating clarity out of chaos. Connecting people. Fixing broken processes. Selling ideas others cannot yet see.
Why does this matter at a pivot point? Because vocation is portable. You can carry it into fractional consulting, a board seat, a new industry, or a restructured version of the role you already hold. A job title is a container. Containers get swapped. Vocations do not. The 68 percent year-over-year growth in fractional executive roles entering 2025 tells you something. The market has recognized that real value is portable and does not need to be tied to an org chart.
Your vocation is the asset that travels.
The prompt: What did you always end up doing, even when it was not in your job description? Not the tasks you were assigned. The things you gravitated toward. Write it in plain language, not job-title language.
V for Audit Your Values, Because They Have Shifted (and That Is Data)
Most people assume their values are fixed. Fabiana does not buy that, and neither does her last decade of executive coaching work. Values shift with career stage, with life stage, with what you have seen and what you have paid with your sweat. That is development, not inconsistency. Changing values are usually operative ones.
In your twenties, the operative value is usually exploration. You will sacrifice almost anything to try new things. In your thirties it becomes achievement and security. By your forties something else surfaces: the desire to make decisions from an internal center, rather than from fear of looking like a failure or losing status. Fabiana calls this a desire for sovereignty, or self-authorship. The ability to ask what you want from your work beyond the paycheck and the title, and to take the answer seriously.
Operate from sovereignty and options open that you could not see while running away from self-imposed fomo and shame.
There are other values, however, which get closer to one’s way of being in the world. The violation of those is fundamental enough to become the catalyst for a meaningful change. Fabiana's own story: she left a blue-chip partnership after leading a few consulting engagements that, together, eliminated about a thousand front-line jobs. The value being violated was one she had held for years, in a low key yet unwavering way: Social Responsibility. She went into those mandates knowing it, tried to rationalize it away, and it still did not hold.
There is no creative or logical reframing that makes a non-negotiable negotiable.
Arthur calls the early signal that a core value is being violated "the ick." The moment when the way an organization needs you to show up makes your body register the wrongness before your mind can explain it. That is a red blasting signal. You have outgrown the container. A practical tool: personalvalu.es runs a free, ten-minute, conjoint-style values ranking exercise. Some results will confirm what you already knew. Some will surprise you.
The prompt: Which of your values are non-negotiable right now? Is your current situation working with them or against them?
P for Shift Your Posture Before You Shift Your Job
Before the resignation letter, try something harder: showing up differently in the room you are already in.
We spend entire careers asking what the organization needs from us so we can get promoted, make partner, hit the numbers. Try the reverse. What do I need from this organization? More autonomy? A specific kind of problem to solve? Learning from a certain type of leader? If you have done the vocation and values work, you will have a real answer. That answer tells you whether you need a new job or a new posture in the one you have.
A story from Arthur: early in his time leading large agencies, he spent the first year trying to be the smartest person in every room. He had all the answers, delivered at speed. It was exhausting and, after the performance curtains closed, not particularly useful. The minute he decided to start saying "I don't know, what do you think?" in board meetings, two things happened. First, the quality of the answers in the room improved, and then, his own influence grew.
We are trained to perform competence. The real leverage is in provoking it in others.
Stop performing as the answer-giver. Start operating as the question-asker. Same title, same team. You have just shifted the center of gravity in the room. "That is a good question. Let me think about it and come back to you tomorrow." Said with confidence, that sentence carries more authority than any answer delivered reactively.
The prompt: Try it. Which single shift could turn a dead end into something worth staying for? The answer to this question may confirm that it’s time to go.
When It Really Is Time to Go
As we’ve seen, not everything can be reframed. Some values violations are non-negotiable, and the posture work only confirms it. The diagnostic is straightforward. If you have done the reflection seriously, tried different approaches, tried a different posture, and you are still cornered, then your non-negotiable values are being consistently overridden. That is a direction, not a rough patch.
Arthur's frame: the goal is to stop running away from something and instead be clear about what you are running toward. There is a difference, and you can hear it in how you talk about it. One note on the practical reality. Portfolio careers and fractional roles require planning. The ramp-up is real, roughly 18-24 months before income stabilizes. Most people who make this move with preparation do not regret it. Almost all who do it on impulse do.
Plan the transition before you announce it.
The Pivot Is Not About Starting Over
The career pivot conversation fixates on destinations. New titles. New industries. New business cards. That is the least fundamental aspect of the issue. Who have you become over the last twenty years? Where do you thrive? Where do you drain? What are you being called to do? These are strategic questions, not just existential ones. The leadership capabilities that matter most right now, systems thinking, strategic clarity, storytelling, real empathy, are precisely the ones a considered transition lets you build on rather than leave behind.
Answer the who questions first. The what gets considerably clearer from there.
You are not starting over. You are picking up from somewhere real.
Done With the Sunday Dread?
If you are done with the Sunday dread and ready for a conversation that is not about tactically finding another job title, let's talk.
Arthur and Fabiana work with senior leaders who are figuring out what comes next and want a real answer instead of another round of LinkedIn browsing. Reach out directly at arthur@sensemaker.ca, fabiana@claristrat.com or connect with us on LinkedIn. No gatekeepers.
Arthur Fleischmann is a marketing and advertising consultant and the founder of Sense.Maker. Former agency founder and Group CEO of Ogilvy Canada. He coaches senior executives on strategy, positioning, and leadership.
Fabiana Pereira Hotz, PPC, is the founder and CEO of Claristrat Institute and an executive coach with over a decade of experience working with C-suite leaders across North America and Europe. Former market lead at Accenture and partner at Deloitte.
Together, they are the first call for senior leaders who want a real answer to what comes next, not another job title.
