You can win the room and still lose the institution.
I learned that from the president’s chair, and it took me longer than I would like to admit. A new direction gets announced. The people I speak with one-on-one nod, and I believe them, because they mean it. They have bought in to me. What they have not bought in to is the team sitting around my cabinet table: the people who will actually carry the change into their offices, their departments and their Monday mornings.
Nick and I have written here about Inherited Resistance™, the accumulated memory of change done to people rather than with them. The workforce carries that memory forward. Most of the conversation since has been about the people being led. This post is about the layer above them. The layer I belong to.
The leadership team is inherited too
Every senior team I have led arrived with its own history. Some of its members survived the last three initiatives by keeping their heads down. Some were promoted because the old culture rewarded exactly what the new direction is trying to stop. Some have quietly told their staff, more than once, that this too shall pass. Little of that disappears when a new president arrives with a clear plan and good intentions. It stays at the table.
“That is the tether. A leader can genuinely commit to where the institution needs to go and still be held to where it has been by the people around them.”
The president signals one thing. The cabinet, often without meaning to, transmits another. And the workforce, which has watched this before, reads the cabinet.
The inherited team is not the villain
I want to be careful here, because this is where the conversation usually turns into blame. The inherited team is not the villain. They learned what the institution taught them. In a study published in 2000, Wanous, Reichers and Austin tested whether cynicism about change is something people bring with them. It isn’t. It is learned, and it traces back to ineffective leadership and to being shut out of decisions.
If it was learned, it was taught. And if it was taught, the institution owns the lesson. Which means its leaders own it. Which means I do.
So the question I put to Nick in August still stands. Is this navigable with care and finesse, or is it a never-ending battle?
My answer is that it is navigable, but rarely at the level most of us try to navigate it. We try to win individuals. We take people to lunch, we earn their trust personally, and we mistake personal loyalty for cultural change. Personal loyalty does not travel. When the person who is loyal to me goes back to their division, they go back to a team that remembers everything I have not yet proven.
What actually travels
What travels is evidence the surrounding team can check for itself. Small commitments, made at the team level and kept in the open, where the people who doubt them can watch them being kept. Then another. Then another. Not a campaign. A record.
That is slow work. It ends, but it ends on the institution’s clock, not the president’s. I have come to believe that the leaders who struggle most with inherited teams are the ones who expected the tether to break the day they arrived.
Nick’s line for the workforce is this: “Your workforce is not resisting your change. They’re remembering everyone else’s failures.”
One level up, the memory sits closer than most presidents realize. It sits at your table.
If you have led a team you inherited, I would like to hear how you knew when it had finally become yours.
No responses yet. Be the first to respond.