I work with clients in open-ended engagements that typically last for several years. Either the client or I can elect to conclude our work together at any time, but I've found that my approach is a good fit for leaders who want a long-term thought partner. As a result, although most clients enter my practice occupying a leadership role that they expect to hold for the foreseeable future, I regularly accompany clients as they transition out of that role into a new chapter of their lives.
In some cases a client's transition occurs in parallel with or is triggered by a business event, such as the sale of the company. Many of these situations provide a sufficient explanation for my client's decision to leave their role. The CEO of an acquired company will likely stay on for a period of time to ensure a smooth handover, and if they leave shortly after the transaction no one wonders why. The change in the business is sufficient explanation.
But in other situations a leader's departure will invite curiosity, and this is particularly true if the transition occurs in the absence of a corresponding business event. When this happens, anyone with a reason to care will begin to ask a series of questions. If these questions aren't raised publicly, they will certainly be raised in private:
- Why is the leader leaving? What does it mean?
- Did the leader initiate the transition, or was it initiated by other stakeholders?
- If the leader initiated the transition, do they lack faith in the business? Are they disgruntled or unhappy in some way?
- If others initiated the transition, do they lack faith in the leader? Did the leader fall short of expectations in some way?
- What are the implications for the future? How will the leader's departure affect the business? How will this transition affect the leader's career?
These questions are often problematic. The situation may be sufficiently complex that the answers are unclear, or different parties may have different answers. The answers may be embarrassing to one party or another, or the fact that there are different answers may itself be embarrassing. This can result in paralysis, with the questions hanging in the air, unresolved.
If these questions go unanswered by the leader or the company, other parties will be left to draw their own conclusions. As my colleague Carole Robin says, in the absence of data we make shit up. So in these situations what's required is a public narrative that provides an explanation for the transition that is sufficient to answer these questions (and any number of others that may arise). Note that this narrative isn't fictional or phony, but it is reductive. It leaves out information that may be confusing or distracting in order to emphasize specific aspects of the situation that provide a coherent explanation. In this sense a narrative is a story, and as I've written before,
Why is storytelling such a powerful process? Because we depend upon narratives to navigate the world--they are our compass in the wilderness, our lantern in the dark. Organizational psychologist Karl Weick called this "sensemaking": we rely upon narratives to "make sense" of ambiguous situations and pursue a plan of action in coordination with others. But our reliance on narratives means that in the absence of a coherent story we will feel lost and ungrounded. [1]
So if you're a leader about to embark upon a transition--or if one has been imposed upon you--what should you do? First, envision the various parties who may have an interest in your transition arrayed around you in a series of concentric circles. People in the innermost circle are there because you trust their discretion and their judgment, and their interests are fully aligned with yours. This space will accommodate a great deal of complexity and nuance, and you benefit by being as candid as possible with the people who occupy it, in part because they will be able to advise you on how to communicate with others.
As you go further out, in each subsequent circle there's a little less trust and a more divergent set of interests. There's less capacity to handle complexity and nuance. As a result, you'll need adjust what you share with the people in that circle by modifying the narrative. Typically this entails reduction--leaving out certain aspects of the situation in order to emphasize others. This ultimately results in a series of narratives that explain your transition to different sets of stakeholders in terms that fit their ability and willingness to comprehend the situation and are appropriate to your relationship with them.
These narratives will get more reductive the further out you go, but it's important that they're all mutually consistent. They shouldn't contradict each other, nor should they contain falsehoods. I don't make this assertion out of naive idealism, but out of pragmatism. Contradictory narratives or those that are demonstrably false risk the loss of trust and create unnecessary complications that can usually be avoided with a modest amount of forethought.
The outermost circle is the public sphere, occupied by individuals you don't know personally, but who for some reason have an interest in your transition. The narrative for the public sphere is generally reductive to the point of simplicity. Thus the cliché, "I want to spend more time with my family." That's almost always true, and it's rarely the whole truth.
I'll add that I often see leaders make three mistakes in this process:
They wait too long.
Leadership roles are hard to obtain, but they can be even harder to leave. Leaders tend to feel a high degree of responsibility for the business and their stakeholders, and they don't want anyone to feel let down, misled, or betrayed by their departure. They want the narrative to reflect "good timing," so they wait for (or try to engineer) a moment when no one will fault them for leaving. But that moment may never come, and the leader may find that the situation gets worse, not better. A theme in my practice is that sometimes there are no good options, only varying degrees of bad. The goal isn't "success," but "avoiding catastrophe." I don't advise acting with undue haste, but I do encourage clients to consider the potential costs of delay. [2]
They pretend they're invulnerable.
I'm under no illusions about the risks to a leader of being perceived as weak or incapable. [3] But leaders in transition can also err by insisting on a narrative that rejects any hint of vulnerability and represents their career as a seamless trajectory with every move "up and to the right." This can contribute to waiting too long as the situation worsens, but it can have other negative consequences. When a leader's desire for a transition is being driven by a sense of fatigue or burnout, the pretense of invulnerability shuts out stakeholders who may be in a position to offer support and exacerbates the leader's sense of isolation.
They rely on unreliable intermediaries.
I began my career as a journalist, and I've had many friends in the media, so I empathize with the challenges faced by people tasked with explaining events in the business world to their readers and viewers. But it's unrealistic for a leader to rely upon journalists and other intermediaries operating in the public sphere to transmit the leader's narrative--they will have narratives of their own. It's also no longer necessary, as communications and PR expert Lulu Cheng Meservey makes clear:
Today, most of the planet is directly reachable by social media or email. There’s no longer a need to go through traditional gatekeepers of information and brokers of reputation--especially as their own credibility has plummeted... Going direct means crafting and telling your own story, without being dependent on intermediaries. [4]
For Further Reading
The Ambiguous Role of Executive Chair
The Problem with Hot-Swapping (On Exec Transitions)
Footnotes
[1] The Importance of Shared Narrative
[2] Kicking the Can Down the Road (On Hard Decisions)
[3] Cautionary Tales (Authenticity at Work)
[4] Go Direct: The Manifesto (Lulu Cheng Meservey, Flack, 2024)
