Early in my tenure at Accounting At this time, I bought to take a seat in on a go to to our workplace from the newly put in head of a serious regulator. Their predecessor within the position had been terribly lively and strongly targeted on a couple of, very particular areas, so I assumed it made sense to ask our visitor in the event that they deliberate any modifications in course or new approaches.
They reacted as if I might slapped them within the face, and with icy disdain knowledgeable me that that they had labored beneath the earlier regulator (which I nicely knew) and that they noticed no must make any modifications in any respect.
Wanting again, I am certain they will need to have thought that I used to be making an attempt to get them to badmouth their predecessor, however on the time I used to be dumbfounded. It appeared to me then {that a} change in command is a pure time for organizations and their leaders to take inventory of the place they’re, and to think about new instructions, new concepts and new approaches. It nonetheless appears that solution to me, and to fail to take action appears a waste of an important alternative.
Why would not you make the most of such a second to ask in case your present course, targets and tradition will drive success sooner or later? A bunch of modifications massive and small could be ushered in beneath cowl of the overarching change on the helm, if you end up now not sure by the priorities of the outgoing chief. (After all, in lots of circumstances the correct selection is likely to be to reaffirm these priorities and to acknowledge their knowledge — however you will by no means know except you critically study them, and too many organizations fail to do this.)
And it is not solely transitions on the high that provide the chance for brand new considering. I am going to go additional and say that any change in personnel, at any degree of the org chart, must be a second to cease and suppose and look forward, to reexamine a place earlier than you begin making an attempt to fill it in a job market the place candidates are few and much between. The appropriate reply may not be changing a departing worker or companion in any respect, however as an alternative reimagining their position; which will take the type of reallocating their obligations and duties to different staff, to new applied sciences, or to outsourcing companions — or eliminating the position totally, and presumably hiring for a brand new and totally different position as an alternative, one which will assist lead the agency into the longer term, moderately than replicating its previous.
All this isn’t to say that change is all the time the correct selection, or that we have to take each alternative to jettison the previous; the purpose is that we have to take each alternative to look at the previous and see if it is value repeating — and that making a break with the previous is not about repudiating it, however about selecting a special future.