What Good Leaders Do When Replacing Bad Leaders - Andrew Blum

This resource first appeared in issue #73 on 07 May 2021 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Other, Managing A Team: Other

What Good Leaders Do When Replacing Bad Leaders - Andrew Blum

At some point in your career, you’re going to step into a role as a leader where the previous leader made a hash of it. They weren’t necessarily a bad person or incompetent, but for whatever reason what they were doing wasn’t working. Blum talks about how to manage that transition.

A key point for me is an early sentence:

Good leaders create a separation between the past and the future.

Creating that rupture between “that was then” and “now we’re moving forward” is key. People want things to work well but it’s pretty easy to stay caught up in the dysfunction of what was happening before. Blum outlines three steps:

• Acknowledge the contributions of the previous leader
• Enable a vision for the future
  • What about how we have worked and operated do we want to maintain?
  • What do we want to leave behind?
  • What do we want to create anew? and
• Seek to understand your employees’ experiences [LJD: one-on-ones are great forums for that!]