4 Ways to Ensure a New Executive Benefits Your Organization, Immediately

The ripple effect of a poor executive transition creates significant risk and expense for both the executive and their organization. It can derail organizational strategy, negatively impact team performance, harm company culture and ultimately cost the organization millions of dollars a year — or more. The productivity of the entire C-suite can also suffer because its members’ are interconnected. 

These four best practices support newly instated executives in a low-risk and high-impact executive transition.

• You must account for the situation that your transitioning colleague faces. Are they replacing an icon or following a trainwreck? Is this a newly created role? As you welcome your new peer, shape your support around the circumstances.

• In 35% of all executive transition situations, the previous leader’s performance was solid, but not outstanding, and the organization needs to quickly move in a different direction because of a strategy change or the broader economic environment. When this is the case, help your new colleague focus on quickly understanding the industry, organization and team dynamics.

• Prepare a group of key stakeholders — the CEO, C-suite peers and direct reports — with whom the new executive will work by providing them resources and tools to interact with and support the new leader. 

• Each person or group has a role to play:

  • The CEO provides business perspective and feedback on strategy.

  • C-suite peers share ideas and information, as well as guide a new leader through the company culture and politics.

  • Direct reports offer candid information about the team’s strengths, weaknesses and challenges.

• Most executive leadership teams approach leadership transitions as one-off events, making them unsystematized and unrepeatable. This unsystematic approach often leaves new executives to self-manage their transition.

• Partner with HR to create a structured, repeatable transition support process, complete with resources, tools and approaches to assist any new-to-role executive with a set of high-impact transition activities.

• The first 90 days of an executive leader’s tenure is make-or-break for their future in the organization. Because of this, most companies limit their transition support to this period. 

• However, there’s often a plateau in performance at the six-to-nine-month mark. Provide your colleague with support well beyond the first 90 days, with a longer-term focus on helping them implement changes and execute new or updated priorities.