Show Up to Win – Kelly O. Kay (2026)

To unlock the best leadership opportunities, you need to become as good at searching for a job as you are at doing one. In today’s fast-moving corporate world, executive careers and the executive job market are more fluid than ever. You may be an ambitious leader who has no trouble closing deals or hitting targets, yet find the next step harder to secure. To land the position you want, you need to define your unique value proposition for that specific role, while recognising that the higher you rise, the harder it becomes to receive honest opinions about your strengths and weaknesses. In Show Up to Win, Kelly Kay and Jeff Sanders, partners at executive search and consulting firm Heidrick & Struggles, provide a roadmap for winning a top-level role and moving into it effectively. Drawing on real-life case studies, interviews, more than three decades of experience, and 200 weekly conversations with Fortune 1000 companies about executive roles, they explain what today’s job search looks like for senior candidates, what companies seek, and how to identify and position yourself for the role they really want. The authors offer unexpected perspectives and counterintuitive advice on what separates candidates who secure the best jobs from those who remain overlooked. The result is a practical and enduring guide to navigating a high-stakes executive job search.