To a Mouse, Robert Burns
In the spirit of cautionary tales, I wanted to capture my observations of successful executives who struggle when they change jobs. Despite their stellar credentials, wisdom and experience, many of them play out a loosely predictable pattern of stages from freshly minted wunder-leader to washed-up cast-off, sometimes within a space of 6 to 18 months. I have attempted to stylize the pattern through cultural allusions, to emphasize the emotional dimension of the theatre of executive transitions. So here goes a common pattern of tenures that are “nasty, brutish and short”:
The Promised Messiah
It starts with hope, and a tearing of the page rather than turning it. The incoming executive has seen the light, and will lead the tired huddled masses to the promised land. It is of course hard to tell at this stage if one is dealing with a brash buccaneer looking for the next adventure, a questing philosopher trailing clouds of glory, a Yoda wanting to return the gift, or a hard-punching Attila who “loves the smell of napalm in the morning” (as the ex INSEAD professor Manfred Kets De Vries puts it in a reference to Apocalypse Now). The organization usually suspends its sense of fatalism over systemically recurring patterns , and wishes to believe that things will indeed be different this time. The leader is invested and burdened with the unrealized hopes and expectations of the people.
The War Dance
An “agenda” quickly emerges after a series of “situational diagnosis” meetings with key stakeholders. This is trumpeted around the reservation in the form of a boisterous war dance. The flaming, irrepressible zeal shows through, however temperately clad, in an impetuous “transformation program”. There is an undertone of iconoclastic, compulsive sneering at predecessors (“they so didn’t get it”). Often the system drives them to show traction early, and strut their stuff. Wispy superficial hypotheses quickly become the reigning assumptions in this over-caffeinated drive to make a splash as an act of redemption (as the employer is chafing their hands expectantly waiting for the ROI on a “telephone number salary”).
The Tyson Moment
Mike Tyson neatly (and apocryphally) paraphrased the Robert Burns stanza at the start of this entry: “Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the mouth“. The first encounters take place with the organizational subterranean wiring. Often in the case of leaders with blue-chip backgrounds cutting their teeth in a less evolved environment, the initial simplistic, knee-jerk snap-in solutions that started life as quick wins (“what this company needs is…”) start getting mired in the invisible morass that many organizations pretend they do not have. “Why is the light switch not working?”, the leader observes quizzically, and is inwardly gnawed by the echoes of “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore”.
The Bonaparte Period
Giving myself the license to belabor this conceit of labeling each phase with a cultural reference, I associate the next phase with the 35-year old conqueror of Europe. He is reported to have said: “If you want something done well, do it yourself“. In the face of setbacks, reversals, and an increasingly Sisyphean feeling of futility (the chap who rolled boulders and things up the hill only for them to roll down again), the leader starts feeling surly and defensive but still defiant and committed to “show them”. They start taking things upon themselves, working themselves ragged, making the cardinal error referred to in an HBR article called the “quick wins paradox“. It is time-consuming and soul-depleting, to kick the tires of a car that won’t move, tinkering with the engine to try and fix it, while simultaneously batting off an increasing number of curve balls thrown by the erratic system, which is now revealing its playful randomness. “This can’t be happening to me,” they think, “it must be this company!”. The aggrieved tone starts becoming evident.
Dr. Wrong
I am not sure this character actually exists, but I have a vague, probably composite image in my mind of eccentric bond villains, Dr. Strange, and a host of cynical characters barking “Wrong” at everything. The leader starts bewailing all that is broken, digging holes deeper by picking fights they can never win, and constantly looking for confirming evidence that the place is deeply broken, irreparably flawed, or under the sway of sinister forces too dark for a straight shooter to engage with. Cynicism reigns supreme.
Not Waving but Drowning
This morbid though compelling image is from the poem of this name by Stevie Smith – a play on the image of a drowning man’s frantic arm gestures being misunderstood by distant onlookers as playful waving. It is a poignant poem about death, misunderstanding, and loneliness, and an apt image to capture the last throes of the beleaguered leader. The narrative of hope and change has gone shrill, and they have either been politely marginalized from the mainstream (with a fading hope held out by just a couple of people that they might still bounce back and prove they were worth it). The bell, book and candle are being taken out (excommunication in the Catholic faith being ritually done by a bell being rung, a book being shut and a candle being snuffed).
Mighty Casey has Struck Out
The dated allusion to the dénouement of the “No Joy in Mudville” misadventure serves well here. If they have not already called it quits in indignation, seeking refuge and repair in self-righteousness, leadership throws the flailing executive under the bus. The Greek tragedy ends with their exit from the stage, with all their music still within them. In some cases, they may have become victim of fragging by embittered team members, or a groundswell of vocal opposition might have dealt a final coup de grace through an episode or misstep.
The Crazy Uncle in the Attic
The last stage could play out differently in certain cases. A worse outcome for the company than showing them the door is of course to consign the crazy uncle to the attic (any place where they can pretend to work, and everyone else can pretend to take it seriously). This is much worse because even as they go about the lifeless motions of any formulaic role they are assigned, they keep squirting poison from their perch.
Pattern – Interrupted
How can executives break this pattern? I believe it needs the courage to go against conventional wisdom about quick wins (the cult of the flamenco of the first 90 days). It starts with the art of getting the balance right between edginess and humility. Too much of either can prematurely typecast the person by affected constituents eager to figure out the new leader, put simplifying labels on them (rash/pastel) or trip them at their blindspots. The urge to deliver fast and earn brownie points can be fatal as it makes one very path dependent. Here are a couple of suggestions:
- Understand the system behind the system. Recognize subtle and often invisible cause and effect relationships and the full feedback loop of the system in equilibrium. Every system, no matter how flawed, is in some form of perverse equilibrium through accords, coping strategies, balancing acts, and other manifestations of “compromis a la Belge” (politically expedient accomodations to keep the machine working). Any change in the system that favors one actor makes others respond to bring it back to equilibrium. The tragedy of course is that everyone is now working much harder…to keep things where they were before.
Understanding the system requires spotting crucial pivot points to leverage (not necessarily quick wins). To find these pivot points, the leader must deeply engage every level. If a system is suffering, it lacks sufficient access to itself – it might be lacking information; it might have lost clarity about who it is; it might be racked by troubled relationships; it might be ignoring those who have valuable insights. These are some of the pivot points the new leader can use to trigger the multiplicative physics of change. - Get the tension right in the elastic band. Connect with like-minded people for reinforcement, and with “conservatives” for a constructive tension – whose natural resolution will propel change at the pace the system can withstand. As Margaret Wheatley puts it (quoting Rudolf Bahro), “when the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure.”
The right tension must be reflected in the single biggest determinant of success – Pacing. The wisdom in pacing is knowing that the system can only change at a certain maximum capacity, reaching that limit quickly, and endowing the system with the practical and emotional resources to increase its capacity for change. It requires an understanding of the “pragmatics” of action in the particular messy milieu below the surface (gained through first hand research – what Toyota calls doing Genchi Genbutsu at the Genba), without applying simplistic theoretical nostrums. It requires a feel for the knock-on chain reactions that any moves will trigger. As Roger Fritz puts it in his structural tension theory, too little tension and there is no movement. Too much tension and there is disengagement, or even revolt.
The right tension should also be reflected in the clarity of the end game, and clarity about the identity and purpose of the system. Facile statements taken from the last offsite (and brand collateral) and burnished with new rhetoric may create too little tension; while radical, revisionist exhortations about “the business we should really be in” might also leave large parts of the organization cold, whose emotional equity is invested in the past. - Stay the course and course-correct. Change always involves some kind of dark night of the soul phase. During this period, bearings may appear to be lost, and the level of angst shoots up. A defense mechanism is to quickly collude with the existing pattern to reassure oneself and one’s constituents that we’re safe. The key is to make people feel okay about not feeling okay – to make them feel at ease with the emergence and fluidity needed in molding something new together. One could overdo this of course, and wallow aimlessly in the confusion unless there is a great effort to engineer the kind of reflective conversations about the future that will make the new vision reveal itself from the collective unconscious of the leadership ranks. This does not mean asinine devotion to the elected route, but commitment to the cause while executing deft micro-pivots.
Notes to Self 
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