Taking the Place of a Well-Loved Manager

If you have just been hired to replace someone who seemed to have had no faults and was well-liked and respected in the company, it may look like an impossible act to follow. But there are strategies for handling succession issues.

You do have a challenge ahead of you, but by understanding the dynamics, you can plan an entry strategy that will make it easier for yourself. When a well-loved manager leaves, employees may feel abandoned. They are suffering the loss of a leader, perhaps a friend, someone whose management style is familiar and whose expectations, standards, and values are known.

Such employees will find it hard to accept the replacement. If the newcomer arrives soon after the predecessor’s departure, if no separation procedure helped the group to let go, and if the emotional costs to the group of its loss are not really well understood, then everyone will have a hard time with the change. In a way, as the new person, you can never take the place of the favorite who came before. Intuitively you wish that person never existed. However, you should honor that person while making yourself known and carving out your own niche.

Never disparage your predecessor’s accomplishments, your new coworkers shared in and will be proud of them. They also will be more loyal to the person who left than to you, and any undue criticism may brand you as the enemy. If, as a new manager, you are in a position to make changes and wish to do so, invoke the spirit of the respected predecessor. You might suggest that your program “builds” on the work done before and is probably what would have been done if he or she had continued.

On occasion, if it is feasible, you can check the changes with the person who left and thereby receive his or her blessings. The changes you recommend can then bring credit to both of you, preparing your group for transition to your ways of thinking. Use accomplishments of the past as a standard, such as:

“The short time it took you to change the molds on the production line last summer under Smith set a new standard for all of us to meet.” You also can ask, “How would Smith have done it?” Asking for information does not oblige you to do the job in the same way, but it does show that you respect Smith’s competence, as well as the group’s, and that you want to take full advantage of it. You can continue to invent, so that you are not controlled by the past and destined to repeat it, by asking, “Now what can we do to improve? Do we have different circumstances now that we must take into consideration?”

This period of honoring your predecessor also is the time to add your own ideas. By respecting the missing person, you are respecting the other group members, and they are more than likely to react to you respectfully in return.

Most people you meet in the company will put their best foot forward. Tension and difficulties often are concealed or minimized. You will have to be alert to subtle cues of strained relationships, territorialism, cliques, power centers, and the feelings people have about the person you are replacing.

How do you find out what you want to know? Ask questions. Pay attention to the way in which people talk about themselves and others. If you have the opportunity to see people interacting, watch how they treat each other. Here are some questions you may want to ask:

• Tell me about the person I am replacing.

• What was he best known for?

• What were some of the problems?

• How did she deal with them?

Engaging employees keeps them not only involved, but committed to the team. Only then can they become real partners with you.

Copyright © 2013. Natasha Josefowitz. All rights reserved.

Change

On the first of February, the home of my biweekly column, the La Jolla Village News, changed its format and is now called La Jolla Today.

A new name for our paper to be published every two weeks, a new format, a new emphasis for our increasingly sophisticated coastal readers—change. As in any change, there will be those that will welcome the new look, they are the adventurers, those who are willing to give up the familiar and plunge into the unknown. Change entails risk, as with anything new, there are probabilities, possibilities, and unanticipated consequences. Of course, in this case, there will be no risks for the reader, only for the publisher. Then there are those who will be upset, write to the editors, complain that the paper was fine before, why make if different and now unfamiliar: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” These are the risk averse people, who cling to tradition, to the security of the familiar, of the known.

We need both people, those who will seek to improve the status quo, the innovators, the creators, the inventors, the risk takers. These people need to be confident that they will be resilient enough to weather any possible negative fallout.

We also need the risk-averse people, those who will caution against undue experimentation and who will help in making more carefully thought-out decisions whether personal, economic, or political.

Some planned changes are made regularly, like the New Year’s resolutions we all make in January, you know the one: “eat less, move more.” In other words, make intelligent food choices (I plan to practice portion control by using smaller plates) and commit to an exercise routine that includes strength training, aerobics, and flexibility (I plan to be 30 minutes on the tread mill five days a week).

The only risk of not following through is the resultant guiltly feelings and poorer health.

The Hawthorne Effect could be an additional motivation. What is the Hawthorne Effect? In 1924–32, a group of Harvard researchers studying the relationship between productivity and work environment at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company in Cicero, Illinois made a discovery consequently known as the Hawthorne Effect.

What they found was that workers improved their productivity no matter how the environment was manipulated—they did better whether their environment was made brighter or dimmer, as long as they were the subject of a study. In other words, individuals improved their performance due to the attention they received from the researchers, making them feel important, and not from changes to the experimental variables. Even when workers were falsely told that the lights would be brighter (they were unchanged) they improved their performance.

How can you use this effect to reach your self-improvement goals? I suggest having a witness when trying out new behaviors—whether an exercise partner who knows your new fitness goals or someone to eat with who knows you are avoiding sweets. In other words, we need the Hawthorne Effect to stay true to our New Year’s resolution,  we need to be observed doing it right. This is why the weekly weigh-ins at places like Weight Watchers work—there is an observer who monitors, and there are other participants who witness and share. Improving alone is hard, get a friend to help you with your goals.

Change, according to the dictionary, means to transform, to modify, to become different. Change also means flexibility, to reverse a previously held opinion or an earlier decision. The way we react to change is also a personality factor; political stances reflect our propensity to tradition and routine or to innovation and risk. Change, whether by intent or by accident is an inevitable part of our lives. We should be ready to accept change and be aware of our habitual reactions to it. We have control over whether we will fight it or welcome it and with the new year upon us, it is our opportunity to do something differently, to do something better than it was.

So, whether it be a new face lift for our community newspaper or changes in your own business or life, commit to the new you, that healthier, more fit you, the one who has given up on bad habits and who finally will learn Spanish or the piano or enroll in that class or walk on the beach or volunteer for a worthy cause or clean out that closet or…. Write your own plan and share it with someone.

Copyright © 2012. Natasha Josefowitz. All right