In brief
On 30 September 2026, Smart Media published Focus Femmes Leaders, a themed supplement distributed with the Swiss business magazine PME in its October issue. Isabelle Gagnon, founder of ITalent SA and co-founder of Exeqia, is profiled in a piece titled "Diriger, c'est faire tenir ses décisions" (Leading means making decisions stick).
The common thread: a decision is only worth something if someone owns it, it is dated, and it produces a measurable effect. Laboratory rigour, applied to governance.
"Proof before promise: authority does not come from displayed certainty, but from what one is willing to put to the test."
Leading: asking the question others avoid
An engineer by training, Isabelle Gagnon began her career in a world where an intuition only counts if it survives the facts. Before founding ITalent, she ran companies and sat on executive committees. The reflex stayed with her: ITalent works across industry, technology, pharma, medtech and watchmaking, always starting from the same point, understanding a governance problem before looking for the person who can solve it.
"For a long time I believed you had to arrive with the answer. The most useful person in the room is the one who asks the question everyone else avoids. That takes more confidence, not less."
In her committees, what is decided is written down, owned by one person and dated. Often the only woman at the table, she turned that into a method rather than bitterness: come with facts, name the gap nobody dares to voice, never confuse polite agreement with real buy in.
Choosing: the mandate before the list
For Isabelle Gagnon, the outcome of a search is decided before the first interview, when the board defines the mandate. Describing the next incumbent based on the previous one is reassuring, but it narrows the field. Her question to the board, before any candidate list:
What will this company need to be able to do in three years that it cannot do today?
The best searches are those where the chair agrees not to shortlist too early.
"Widening a list does not lower the bar. It means applying stricter criteria to a larger field."
This sits at the heart of ITalent's executive search methodology: a demanding brief and a search that reaches beyond the names that spring to mind.
Widening the field: a matter of mechanics
Women hold close to 38% of management positions in Switzerland. Asked about their presence on boards, Isabelle Gagnon talks mechanics rather than conviction: a structured search surfaces people the board would not have met and applies the same criteria as to familiar candidates. The candidate pool changes, without any quota.
"The qualities a board looks for are not distributed by gender. What is unevenly distributed is the likelihood that a name comes to mind immediately."
The reasoning goes beyond gender: it applies to any profile a board does not naturally come across.
Holding: from appointment to execution
Placing the right person is not enough; they inherit a strategy that has to hold. Isabelle Gagnon's work gives her a rare vantage point: she meets leaders again years after their appointment.
Seven out of ten excellent strategies fail in execution, not in design. At Exeqia, the consulting firm she co-founded, this gap has a name: drift. Invisible, constant, but measurable and therefore correctable. The Exeqia platform links priorities, projects, decisions, deadlines and teams, flags each drift with an auditable fact, and consultants then hand the method over to the teams.
"A strategy is only worth the decisions it actually triggers."
Trained to lead with data and artificial intelligence through executive programmes in Europe and North America, she expects one thing from these tools: to spot drift earlier.
"An algorithm helps you see what is moving. Deciding what matters remains a human responsibility."
The original page
Click the image to read the full supplement on Issuu (in French).
Read Focus Femmes Leaders on Issuu →
Further reading
- Bilan · The Art of Choosing Those Who Decide
- Outils de coachs et d'experts · Owning the Leader's Stance
- How to choose an executive search firm?
- Exeqia, the art of strategy execution
Source
Discuss a mandate with ITalent →
Frequently asked
Questions on this topic.
- Where was the portrait "Diriger, c'est faire tenir ses décisions" published?
- Isabelle Gagnon's portrait appeared in Focus Femmes Leaders, a themed supplement by Smart Media distributed with the Swiss business magazine PME in October 2026 (published online on 30 September 2026). It follows the portrait published by Bilan in Focus Femmes Inspirantes in April 2026.
- According to Isabelle Gagnon, when is the outcome of an executive search decided?
- Before the first interview, when the board defines the mandate and sets its criteria. Rather than describing the next incumbent based on the previous one, she asks the board what the company will need to be able to do in three years that it cannot do today.
- How does a structured search improve board diversity?
- By widening the field: a structured search surfaces people the board would never have met and applies to them the same criteria as to familiar candidates. The candidate pool changes without any quota. For Isabelle Gagnon, widening a list does not lower the bar; it means applying stricter criteria to a larger field.
- What is the link between ITalent and Exeqia?
- Isabelle Gagnon leads ITalent SA (executive search and leadership advisory) and co-founded Exeqia, a consulting firm that publishes a strategy execution platform. ITalent places leaders; Exeqia helps organisations make the strategy those leaders inherit actually hold, by measuring the drift between decisions and results.
