You take over something somebody else built. A district, a firm, a department, a board chair. The authority transfers on the first day and the understanding does not transfer at all.
Everybody around you holds knowledge you lack, and nobody will volunteer it, because they do not experience it as knowledge.
The pressure runs the wrong way
A new leader has maximum permission to act and minimum information, and every incentive encourages acting on it.
Whoever appointed you expects visible movement. Your own instinct is to demonstrate that the appointment was correct. And the inefficiencies are conspicuous, because you are the only person present who has not normalised them.
So the standard sequence is a set of changes in the first quarter, several of which remove something load-bearing, with the consequence appearing eighteen months later and being attributed to circumstances.
The correction is not to change nothing. It is to establish why things are as they are before altering them, which takes weeks rather than years.
Use the window while it is open
A new arrival can see what everybody else has stopped noticing, and that capacity has a short life.
Within about six weeks the practices that looked strange will have become simply how things are done here, and the observation is unrecoverable.
So write it down in the first fortnight. Everything that seems odd, inefficient, or unexplained, without judging any of it. That list is an asset with an expiry date, and it is the agenda for the enquiry that follows rather than a list of things to fix.
Ask why, of the people who know
Take the list to the long-serving people — the clerk, the foreman, the secretary, the person who has been there twenty years — and go through it item by item.
The answers sort into three categories, and the sorting is the whole exercise. Practices with a live reason, which must not be touched. Practices with a reason that has expired, which can go once the reason is confirmed dead. And practices nobody can account for, which are the genuine candidates and are fewer than they appeared on day one.
Asking also does something beyond information. It establishes that the new person consults the people who hold the history, which determines how much of it reaches you over the following years.
The predecessor
Where they are reachable, an afternoon with them is the highest-return time available, and new leaders avoid it out of a wish to establish independence.
The eight questions from the institutional memory chapter apply directly, and the ones that matter most are what has been tried that did not work, what tends to go wrong here and what precedes it, and what they are worried will be lost.
Most predecessors give this willingly, particularly when asked in a form that is about the institution rather than about their performance.
Where the relationship is difficult, or the departure was not voluntary, the information still exists in the long-serving staff and the minutes, and three years of minutes read properly is a substitute worth the tedium.
Following somebody who was loved
A specific and common difficulty. You are being compared continuously to somebody with decades of accumulated standing, and every difference reads as a deficiency.
Two responses fail. Imitating them, which is transparent and unsustainable. And distinguishing yourself by changing things, which reads as disrespect for what people valued.
What works is naming it once, plainly, and then being consistent. I am not going to do this the way he did, and I am going to hold the same things he held. Then demonstrating the second part repeatedly, because that is what people are actually worried about.
Their decisions were accepted without explanation because of thirty years of standing you do not have. Yours will be assessed on their merits, which means explaining reasoning that your predecessor never had to explain — not a weakness, and a different job.
Start the record on day one
The obligation that follows from having just experienced the gap.
Somebody will inherit this from you, and everything you are currently struggling to reconstruct is something a predecessor could have written down in an afternoon.
Recording decisions with their reasoning, from the first month, costs a few minutes each and compounds. It is also the only point at which a leader has the motivation to do it, because the experience of arriving without it is immediate.
A leader who resolves to start that record later will not, for the same reason nobody else did.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD