Early in my tenure at Accounting Today, I got to sit in on a visit to our office from the newly installed head of a major regulator. Their predecessor in the role had been extraordinarily active and strongly focused on a few, very specific areas, so I thought it made sense to ask our guest if they planned any changes in direction or new approaches.
They reacted as if I’d slapped them in the face, and with icy disdain informed me that they had worked under the previous regulator (which I well knew) and that they saw no need to make any changes whatsoever.
Looking back, I’m sure they must have thought that I was trying to get them to badmouth their predecessor, but at the time I was dumbfounded. It seemed to me then that a change in command is a natural time for organizations and their leaders to take stock of where they are, and to consider new directions, new ideas and new approaches. It still seems that way to me, and to fail to do so seems a waste of a great opportunity.
Why wouldn’t you take advantage of such a moment to ask if your current direction, goals and culture will drive success in the future? A host of changes big and small can be ushered in under cover of the overarching change at the helm, when you are no longer bound by the priorities of the outgoing leader. (Of course, in many cases the right choice might be to reaffirm those priorities and to recognize their wisdom — but you’ll never know unless you critically examine them, and too many organizations fail to do that.)
And it’s not only transitions at the top that offer the opportunity for new thinking. I’ll go further and say that any change in personnel, at any level of the org chart, should be a moment to stop and think and look ahead, to reexamine a position before you start trying to fill it in a job market where candidates are few and far between. The right answer might not be replacing a departing employee or partner at all, but instead reimagining their role; that may take the form of reallocating their responsibilities and tasks to other employees, to new technologies, or to outsourcing partners — or eliminating the role entirely, and possibly hiring for a new and different role instead, one that may help lead the firm into the future, rather than replicating its past.
All this is not to say that change is always the right choice, or that we need to take every opportunity to jettison the past; the point is that we need to take every opportunity to examine the past and see if it’s worth repeating — and that making a break with the past isn’t about repudiating it, but about choosing a different future.
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