Transitioning Leaders to a New Role

This is one of my favourite cases from a few years back. It involves a brilliant branch sales manager who was seen as a rising star in his organisation. You had only to see him in action addressing a group of employees - he was engaging, communicated brilliantly and inspired others with his leadership. He spent a lot of his time going out to the field to work with his sales reps or to stand on the shop floor with his sales promoters and help them sell. Typically, at the end of a day's work, he would take his colleagues out to dinner,insist on driving them home, say hello to their family and pick them up the following morning to work. During the drive to work, he would review the previous day's work with encouragement and coaching.

You can understand why his employees would run through a brick wall for him and why his results exceeded expectations. Yet, here we were, a year after his promotion to HOD, sitting with him and his CEO, trying to understand why this man had lost his mojo. All the confidence, energy and drive in him seemed to have drained away. He just could not make the right decisions even though his style of working had not changed. Things had reached such a stage, that with his fellow HODs, he had become an object of derision.

This is what had happened: his new role was more strategic in nature. While driving sales (nationally this time) was still a deliverable, there were other leadership issues of equal or greater importance such as the impending change of their business, shaking people out of their comfort and using technology to lead this change.

Using the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI) as a tool to make sense of this issue, this leader's strengths lay in his interpersonal (Red), operational and organising (Green) talents. Those same talents were what he continued to use in his new role - still going out to the field and working with sales reps through the country, visiting branches and delivering inspiring talks - pretty much replicating what he had done before but on a larger scale. His new role (depicted in the black profile above) contained deliverables that were more Blue (driving results, analysing data, modeling change behaviour) and Yellow (setting direction, creating and selling a vision, leading & communicating change, etc) in nature. A comparison between his own profile (depicted in purple) and his new role profile demonstrated the gaps.

He struggled in the new role, not through incapability but more through repeating behaviour that had brought him success previously. Had he been transitioned deliberately and methodically into the new role, he would probably have understood that a number of demands of the new role were not his natural preference. However, knowing him, he would have meticulously upped his capability in those areas that were not a natural strength.

I would love to be able to say that after I had coached him, he saw the light, made great progress and ended up even more successful than before but there was no such happily ever after ending in this case. He was beginning to make progress but was still struggling. During this time, a new CEO came into the organisation. Change was not happening fast enough, so, he froze this guy out into a newly created, inconsequential role. He subsequently left the company that he had served for close to 20 years.

Helping a new leader transition into a new role is so crucial. A systematic approach does wonders to help a new leader hit the ground running, so to speak

And it's not just about explaining what their new role is expected to deliver. It's helping them understand the new role in relation to their strengths and developmental needs as well as helping them align with and leverage on their new team during the transition. Some good has come about from this experience though. This organisation now offers structured transition support to any of their managers who takes on a new role.

Managing a Leadership/Team Transition forms a part of Aspire Consulting's 12 leadership development modules. Pete Pereira and Helen Langhammer have crafted and delivered leadership, team and organisational culture change solutions for the the past 18 years. This module is facilitated using the Aspire Leadership Transition suite of assessment tools