291: Executive Transitions: From Zhuangzi to Michael Watkins

Dear Friends

Thank you for your generous messages after last week’s letter. If you enjoyed it, you might also appreciate The Power of the Powerless, Self-Doubt and Success or Being Good at Being Lost.  

Today’s letter is a bit more pragmatic: managing executive transitions. It is also a touch philosophical: we build a bridge between 300 BC, Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi and contemporary leadership transition expert, Michael Watkins (he of The First 90 Days).

We often misattribute our challenges to contemporary commercial life. It helps to be reminded that much of the complexity we encounter is simply being human. Knowing that, we can move with greater compassion for ourselves and more effectiveness with others.

The letter has its roots in something that consistently surprises me: how poorly and haphazardly we integrate new employees into our organisations and existing employees into new roles, and how unconsciously we ourselves may approach the same challenge.

Watkins notes on leadership transitions, “Failure is never only about the flaws of the new leader”.
In truth, it should not surprise me, because on at least one occasion (undoubtedly more), I was guilty of similar subpar leadership.

I’d been caretaking a team after an accomplished leader had resigned. She was a significant loss to the organisation, and her team missed her. Replacing her was impossible, but I needed to find someone whom the team would respect and who had the courage and skill to step into a role that had been occupied so definitively, with much public acclaim and award.

It took months. Many interviews. Eventually, I found the person. She could only start in two months. I carried on caretaking whilst juggling other roles.

Then that glorious day arrived, she was starting. I asked her to come in at 07h30. We sat down. I told her all that I had observed. I gave her my hypotheses and sense of what her priorities ought to be. Took her to her office, introduced her to the staff member who would do wider introductions, and told her I’d see her in two weeks. She later told me that she waited for me to turn the corner and then phoned her previous employer to ask for her job back. Too late.

Thankfully, my reputation was such that others persuaded her it was probably an off day (in the cauldron that was that particular period, that was generous; I had several misfires that, in retrospect, make me cringe). She stayed, and later, graciously, replayed this to me.

In hindsight, absurd. It had taken me months to find her. Together with our HR team, we’d invested hours upon hours pursuing various options. And then, after all that, I simply stepped back. I wish I were the errant exception, but I see it often, in organisation after organisation: how we onboard people, how we integrate them into their roles, is, without doubt, one of the most significant value leakages in organisations.  

Watkins provides us with two critical guardrails.

The first: it is not only us that starts the new job, but also everyone around us.

We are necessarily different from our predecessors. We bring different experiences, ways of working, and expectations, frequently unspoken, and that ripples into the system, requiring adjustments from everyone.

Watkins estimates each new hire affects at least 12 others. And obviously, the higher up the hierarchy you go, the more people you affect. It requires us to be intentional. To both understand ourselves and our ways of working (you’d be surprised how many people don’t know the answer to that question) and how others both prefer to work and worked with our predecessors (potentially different things).
 
The second: it takes time. For a mid-level leader, they start to break even around 6 months. For senior leaders, it is longer, around 14 months. In my practice, working with divisional executives and CEOs, it is around the 18-month mark that I see them beginning to hit their stride.

Watkins identifies 7 risks in those early days: sticking with what we know, falling prey to the action imperative, setting unrealistic expectations, attempting to do too much, coming in with the answer, engaging in the wrong type of learning, and neglecting horizontal relationships (at least the first 5 are present in the FT’s coverage of this week’s ousting of BP Chair, Albert Manifold. He was in the seat less than a year).

It takes time – we forget – because organisations are immensely complex (as are we).

We have to learn. We have to understand. We need to archaeologically uncover all the hidden, unspoken, implicit ways in which the place works, for good and for bad. I guarantee they’re never, not ever, written down. They live in and between people. We must take the time to learn. If we do, we build a reservoir of respect that will sustain for years to come.

Two thousand four hundred years ago, Zhuangzi wrote the parable of the Duke and the Wheelwright.

Duke Huan of Qi sat in his palace, reading a philosophy book. Down in the courtyard, a wheelwright named Bian was chiselling and shaping a wooden wagon wheel.
Pausing his work, the wheelwright looked up and called out to the Duke: “May I venture to ask, my Lord, what words are in the book you are reading?”
The Duke replied: “The words of the great sages.”
The wheelwright asked: “Are the sages still alive?”
“No,” the Duke answered, “they are dead long ago.
“The wheelwright nodded and delivered his verdict:
“In that case, what you are reading is nothing but the chaff and dregs of the men of old!”
Enraged, the Duke barked: “How does a lowly wheelwright have the right to criticize the books I read? If you can explain your reasoning, you live. If not, I will have you executed!”
Wheelwright Bian didn’t panic. He calmly replied, “I look at this based on my own craft. When I carve a wooden wheel, if I am too gentle with the chisel, the blade slides and won’t grip the wood. But if I hack too hard, the blade bites in and gets stuck. Not too slow, not too fast—I feel it in my hand and respond with my mind.”
This knack is something I cannot possibly put into words. It is something I cannot teach to my own son, and he cannot learn it from me. That is why, even though I am seventy years old, I am still out here making wheels myself. The men of old died and took with them the incommunicable essence of their mastery. So, my Lord, the book you are reading is merely the leftover dregs of the ancients.”

It’s a powerful reminder for incumbents: when we bring people into our organisation, our role is to do the impossible – to make visible our craft. And, as you know, I love books, but this is not something you can read your way to, you need to have their hands on yours, as you carve. You need to help them see and feel how you navigate the act of creation in your organisation. It is active. It is engaged. It is modelled. Remember: your mastery was built over years, over thousands of interactions and decisions, it is incumbent on you to actively and consistently demonstrate it.

In two chapters – Negotiate Success and Achieve Alignment – Watkins translates that ancient insight into contemporary practice.

Watkins observes, “Many new leaders just play the game, reactively taking their situation as given – and failing as a result. The alternative is to shape the game by negotiating with your boss to establish realistic expectations, reach consensus, and secure sufficient resources”.

In my practice, I see this as an ongoing requirement. It is all too easy to slip into business-as-usual, and then the disconnect begins. A periodic zooming out to re-establish what success looks like is imperative.

Underneath Watkins’ three simple phrases – establish realistic expectations, reach consensus, and secure sufficient resources – is an ocean of complexity. Your realistic is based on your experience, as are your boss’s. Your boss may have held your role, and so is convinced he knows, but conditions have changed. In each instance, understanding that different perspectives can also trigger our emotions is invaluable. You have different lenses; you’ll see different things. But, if you’re not sufficiently self-aware, emotion and judgement will colour the conversation. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan reminds us, “The very foundation of interhuman discourse is misunderstanding”.  

Watkins gives several useful tips. Here are a few: don’t stay away, don’t surprise your boss, don’t only bring problems (include proposed plans), surface the highest priority items, don’t expect your boss to change (at least not immediately), aim for some early wins and (critically) build credibility with people your boss respects.

Early on, you want to ensure you’re having four conversations consistently (they’re emergent rather than once-off): situational diagnosis, setting expectations, building resourcing and clarifying styles of working.

Again, from my practice, you want to keep looping back to the first three. The world changes constantly, effectively giving us new jobs every few months or years (depending on your sector).

These conversations are the building blocks of my next go-to chapter, “Achieve Alignment”. Here Watkins expands from the interpersonal into the systemic – how all parts of the business connect. His analysis is too rich to reduce to a few dozen words, so I’ll leave you with two common traps that he identifies, and I see more than I’d like.

The first, trying to restructure your way out of a deeper problem. Redesigning organograms is organisational crack. It feels like once it starts, the business becomes addicted. Frequently, the problem lies elsewhere – processes, resourcing, skill, culture – but it is all too easy to juggle the org chart and feel productive. And then, 18 months later, do the same. Ad nauseam.

The second is making change for change’s sake. Don’t. It is tempting. And maybe not that self-satisfying to say “I’m continuing with what my predecessor put in place” but, in several circumstances, it is the wisest course of action.

That’s it for today. More how-to-do than my usual style, but given the conversations I’ve had this year, it felt necessary.

If you’re missing our African flavour, here are thoughts from Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah and author and photographer Teju Cole. I have invoked them to address South Africa’s recurrent xenophobia and the disturbing way in which Africa’s accomplishments are discounted.  

It is June tomorrow. Summer for some. Winter for others. Whichever it is, I hope you are well.
 
Karl
PS: If you’re navigating an executive transition, you may want to work with me. You can find out more about my coaching practice here. If this is your first time reading this letter, you can subscribe here.
PPS: If you want to read further, these will help: my letters on starting a new job, Picking the Right Transition Strategy, How Managers Become Leaders, Leading After the Founder and Get Off the Transformation Treadmill.