Leadership change vs leadership transition

Click on image for preview video

Hello fellow ramblers and happy new year. It’s been about 6 weeks since I last took a ramble with you. There are many reasons why I haven’t felt motivated or inspired to write and I’m sure I don’t need to explain to you what those are. A client I met with this week manages a teaching faculty of 100 who just transitioned back to remote teaching... again. I asked how morale was, she said, ‘they’re dispirited.’ I get that. Yet here we are in 2022. One foot in front of the other. One day at a time. Expecting the unexpected. Etc.

One of the reasons I haven’t rambled with you is that I am busy facilitating a search process for an organization whose leader is retiring after over two decades. The last search I ran was for an organization whose founding leader retired after three decades. Business economists have long been anticipating a seismic turnover in senior leadership as the baby boomer generation pack up their offices in droves. The non-profit arts sector is no exception with the next generation of leaders stepping into complex roles during challenging times. It’s also a fact that this new generation of leaders are extremely unlikely to stay for a decade, let alone two or three. To that end, search committee members in both searches had the same question for me; ‘When a long-tenured leader leaves, why does their replacement often have a short tenure?’ There are many reasons why a new hire might not work out, as this terrific LinkedIn articles explores. Of course, I knew I wanted to look at this question through the lens of transition.

The obvious answer is the ‘big shoes to fill’ scenario. How can a new leader possibly live up to the massive expectations laid out for them in the wake of the former leader’s departure? The new leader must straddle a very fine tension point: Don’t upset a long-standing arrangement and be sure to honor the past, while at the same time, make your own mark and please shepherd in a new vision. This is a tall order for any incoming leader. And, there’s only so much that the outsider coming in can do to manage that tension successfully because the tension existed before they even stepped through the door. After some reflection, here’s where I landed. The reason incoming leaders sometimes don’t stay long when following a long tenured leader is that much attention has been paid to the change event, meaning the leader leaving, and hardly any attention to the transition.

One day the old leader is in their office, and the next day, somebody new. It’s an event, an external, situational change. However, the transition began the day the outgoing leader picked up the phone to call the board chair, perhaps as much as a year or two earlier, to let them know they had set their retirement date. That phone call sets off a long transition process that arguably lasts until the new leader has been in place for one year. Here’s Bridges:
Several important differences between change and transition are overlooked when people…use change and transition interchangeably. With a change, you naturally focus on the outcome the change produces. Transition is different. The starting point for dealing with transition is not the outcome but the ending that you will have to make to leave the old behind. Situational change hangs on the new thing, but psychological transition depends on letting go of the old reality and the old identity you had before the change took place. Orgs overlook the letting go process completely and do nothing about the feeling of loss that it generates. And, in overlooking those effects, they nearly guarantee that the transition will be mismanaged and that, as a result, the change will go badly. Unmanaged transition makes change unmanageable.

I can’t recommend enough that organizations read Managing Change by Bridges as soon as the Board Chair puts down the phone. And not just the leadership, but anyone who will be impacted by this change and therefore participating in the transition. He goes into detail as to what can be done to prepare the community for the uncertain times ahead. Here’s a few of his top tips:

1)  Communicate, communicate, communicate - Say what you know, say what you don’t know. Keep people abreast of your anticipated plans, actions, and timelines. People may interpret a lack of communication as a signal that they have been intentionally excluded or that things aren’t going well
2)  Manage expectations and set realistic goals – Productivity and the ability to focus can be affected as the sadness and anxiety around the change event increases
3)  Avoid unnecessary additional changes - Can you put off a database migration for another year, or reconsider a change of venue for the annual gala?
4)  Plan events that mark the ending - Celebrate. Give people a chance to say goodbye
5)  Create some space between the outgoing leader’s last day and the new leader’s first day – Allow time for the presence of the old leader to dissipate, even if it’s just for a week or two. There’s a growing practice of putting interim leadership in place or creating a temporary transitional leadership team to bridge this period. Inserting some neutral time to allow the absence of the previous leader to land and for people to take a breath before welcoming the next, is one to consider
6) Identify who is losing what? - Acknowledge the losses. Allow people to be sad
7)  Be compassionate - Rushing people to ‘just get over it’ always backfires
8)  Normalize and name the messiness – Give people a language to frame what’s happening and the space to talk about it publicly
9) The messiest part of the transition process begins just when you think it’s over! You’ve held a farewell celebration for the departing leader, and you’ve held a welcome breakfast for the incoming leader. After about three months of meet and greets, the new leader moves out of the ‘listening and learning’ zone and into the ‘let’s get to work’ zone. Here begins the hardest part of the leadership transition process.

This is just a snapshot of the wisdom Bridge’s offers on any significant organizational transition. At the heart of the matter is, “the results you are seeking depend on getting people to stop doing things the old way and getting them to start doing things the new way. And since people have a personal connection with the way they work, there is just no way to do that impersonally.”

Successfully managing a leadership transition can be a defining moment for an organization’s culture. Either it deepens people’s understanding of how the organization is already using and realizing its core values on a daily basis, or it helps to establish the values that are most critical to caring for the human fabric of those who invest in the mission over and above every day.