A new leader enters without past baggage but must quickly learn what the organization holds sacred. A veteran leader has deep knowledge but may be blind to habits they created. Both need honest self-reflection and frontline communication to navigate change.
When a leader is going through this, you're really starting in one of two places. Either you're new to the company or maybe you've been there a long time, and each presents both challenges and opportunities from it, right? If you're new, you're not burdened by anything in the past, right? You don't feel any responsibility for it. Doesn't matter what's a monument or what a sacred cow is. They're nothing to you, right? And you have to be careful with that because you really need to understand what the company's going to go through and help them go through it. Just because you may not realize it's a sacred cow doesn't mean they don't. You still got to get them through it, and it'll allow you to maybe look past it and deal with it and not have the burden with it, but you must take it seriously as you go through. An existing leader, someone who's been around a long, particularly a leader sitting in a long time, those sacred cows, you know they're there. You may not even realize it's a sacred cow. In fact, you may have created the sacred cows, and it's sometimes very hard to look in the mirror and go, wait a minute, I might be the problem with it. So, One side, you have it, you see it, you understand the history of how we got here, and that history sometimes can hold you back. If you think about it, and this is what I tell people all the time, think about it when you start out, this is your first day, particularly if you're an experienced leader, and you happen to have all this great knowledge of everything that's going on, but you don't own any of that knowledge, right? The person who had actually got fired, they left the day before for whatever reason, they're no longer there, but you know everything. Now use that knowledge to propel yourself and go fast and miss all the potential potholes, miss all those issues, but know they have to be gone through. Now that's tough to do, but if you can do it, you will go faster and more excited than anyone else through. As the new leader, the real key is you need to come in and seek deeply to understand, but at the same time moving forward. And you do that through communication. Go out, talk to the people, spend time with them, let them tell you what they're facing, and your job at that point is to help them go through it, but you recognize they're going to have to go through it as you deal with it. So either way is fine. You just need to make sure you understand where you are, your blind spots, and be able to get yourself through it.
