Creative & agile global executive search
Philosophy
Client-first approach
Philosophy
Jago believes successful leadership appointments rely on a relationship of total trust and transparency. Working in partnership with an independent consultant affords his clients a higher level of accountability and enables a more creative and collaborative approach to attracting and hiring the right talent.
Experience
Client-first approach
Philosophy
Jago has an unusually broad networks and sectoral experience, spanning the private, public, and nonprofit sectors in the UK and globally. He has led assignments for all sizes of organisation, a c-suite, board, and senior exec levels. He is particularly experienced in supporting new organisations, looking to build a complementary and diverse senior leadership team.
Values
Client-first approach
Client-first approach
Jago's approach is built on honesty, rigour, and a total focus on delivering the right hire for your organisation. He has supported many of his clients on a range of senior leadership appointments, reflecting the trust and insight gained by long-term partnership. This empowers him to challenge clients to consider non-traditional and creative candidates, ensuring they gain from diverse experience.
Client-first approach
Client-first approach
Client-first approach
Search firms serving social impact clients are typically bloated, volume-oriented operations content to recycle the same applications and while the most junior staff undertake candidate engagement. This serves clients badly in a time of flux. Jago helps clients to build a search process that accounts for your strategic priorities, focusin
Search firms serving social impact clients are typically bloated, volume-oriented operations content to recycle the same applications and while the most junior staff undertake candidate engagement. This serves clients badly in a time of flux. Jago helps clients to build a search process that accounts for your strategic priorities, focusing on high-value work and prioritising proactive search, thoughtful scrutiny, and rigorous referencing.
Clients
Approach
Leadership challenges in a times of turmoil
Leading a global social impact organisation today is demanding in ways both familiar and newly complex. Senior leaders in philanthropy, NGOs, and mission-driven organisations are navigating persistent uncertainty, rising expectations, and a world less predictable year on year. Decisions carry more weight, and the consequences of getting them wrong are harder to undo.
Financial pressure is now an everyday reality. Funding is less stable than it once was, and governments, foundations, and corporate donors are asking tougher questions about impact, governance, and cost. Inflation, political change, and economic fragility have made long-term planning harder, while new models of giving and blended finance force leaders to rethink how their organisations are funded and sustained.
The operating environment is tightening too. In many countries civil society faces heavier regulation and growing suspicion, particularly where international funding is involved, and even in established democracies compliance and reporting demands keep climbing. Leaders must protect their organisations, their people, and their values while working constructively within shifting political limits.
Technology brings both promise and unease. Digital tools and artificial intelligence are opening new possibilities in fundraising, communications, and service delivery, but adoption is rarely straightforward. Many organisations are moving faster than their systems, skills, or safeguards can comfortably support, even as cyber and reputational risks rise.
People remain at the heart of it. Expectations of social impact leaders are high and the pressures unrelenting; burnout is common, senior talent is harder to retain, and succession planning is too often postponed in favour of the urgent. Building resilient leadership teams and healthier cultures is now essential, not aspirational. Trust, meanwhile, is more fragile than ever: donors and partners want clear evidence of impact and strong governance, public scrutiny is immediate and unforgiving, and a reputation built slowly can be undone quickly.
The leaders who will thrive are not those with all the answers, but those who can exercise sound judgement, adapt to change, and lead with steadiness under pressure. For any organisation seeking to protect and grow its impact, the quality of its leadership has never mattered more.
Adaptable and personalised executive search
The global social impact sector is changing at a pace few leaders have experienced before. Public expectations are higher, scrutiny is more intense, and the space for error is shrinking. Organisations are being asked to deliver meaningful results while navigating political pressure, funding uncertainty, and growing complexity. In this environment, leadership quality is not a secondary concern; it is central to an organisation's ability to protect its mission and sustain its impact.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the competition for senior talent. Attracting, appointing, and retaining effective leaders has become significantly harder at the very moment the cost of a poor appointment is at its highest. Traditional, volume-led executive search is ill-suited to this reality. Rigid processes, standardised shortlists, and transactional candidate engagement do little to address the uncertainty, risk, and nuance a senior leader weighs before considering a move.
In times of instability, organisations need a search partner who brings judgement, discretion, and deep sector understanding. Identifying the right leaders increasingly means building trusted relationships with people who are fully committed to their current roles and not actively looking to move. These candidates need informed, credible counsel to help them assess risk, opportunity, and alignment with mission, often over an extended period.
Jago works in close partnership with clients to design a search process shaped around their specific context, challenges, and ambitions. By leading every assignment personally, from initial brief through to appointment and transition, he reduces risk, sustains momentum, and adapts the search as circumstances change. This allows for creativity and persistence in reaching the right individuals, not simply those who happen to be available. The result is leadership appointments that stand up to scrutiny, endure through uncertainty, and strengthen organisations at the moments strong, steady leadership matters most.
About Jago
Jago has over 18 years' experience in international executive search. He began his career with a leading boutique search firm, working across the education, arts, and not-for-profit sectors on both executive and non-executive board appointments. He went on to advise multilaterals, arts institutions, and civil society organisations on senior leadership appointments with the Education and Social Enterprise practice of Heidrick & Struggles, a top-three global firm, and brings board-level insight from his time with Lygon Group, where he worked on non-executive appointments for the FTSE 100 and 250.
Since establishing his own practice in 2015, he has led a wide range of leadership assignments for clients in the UK and overseas: philanthropic foundations, impact investors and intermediaries, social impact agencies and consultancies, think tanks, policy and academic institutions, and campaigning and advocacy organisations. His clients are typically global in reach and mission, and concerned with hiring diverse, multicultural leaders. Many come to him to bring new technology, ideas, and approaches to bear on the most pressing questions of the public good, and his ability to work across sectors, helping candidates move into social impact careers, has proved valuable in attracting the right talent to lead that change.
Jago studied sixteenth and seventeenth century painting under T.J. Clark at the Courtauld Institute, where he gained an MA in History of Art. He holds a BA in Politics from the University of Durham, and has also studied at the Institut d'Études Politiques in Aix-en-Provence and at Birkbeck College, University of London.