Funds building out or expanding an operating partner function often hire for a specific profile, deep functional or sector expertise, strong analytical capability, a track record of value creation at previous roles, and then find that a meaningful proportion of these hires don’t work out particularly well in their first year, despite genuinely strong credentials on paper.

The reason usually isn’t a mismatch in capability, it’s a mismatch in a specific skill that credentials don’t reliably signal: the ability to build genuine influence with a management team that has no formal obligation to listen to you. 

An operating partner has, in most structures, no direct line authority over portfolio company management. Whatever influence they have is built through credibility, relationship, and demonstrated usefulness, not through organisational position. 

Candidates coming from backgrounds where they held direct authority, a former operating executive, a former consultant used to being explicitly engaged and paid to be listened to, often underestimate how much of the job is this specific kind of influence-building, because it wasn’t the primary skill their previous roles demanded of them. 

The hires who work out well in year one, regardless of their specific background, tend to be the ones who invest heavily and early in exactly this skill, building genuine relationships and demonstrating value on small, concrete things before attempting anything more ambitious, as covered in more depth elsewhere. 

The hires who struggle tend to arrive assuming their credentials alone will earn the trust and access the role requires, and find, often around month three or four, that credentials open the door but don’t keep it open. 

For funds building this function, the practical implication is that hiring criteria weighted heavily toward credentials and analytical pedigree may be systematically underweighting the specific relationship-building skill that actually predicts year-one success. Worth testing for directly in the hiring process, rather than assuming it correlates reliably with the more visible signals on a CV.