“Under New Management”
We have all seen the signs, “ Under New Management” posted outside of businesses from local eateries to hardware stores. The phrase is meant to bring a breath of fresh air and re-engage a fraying audience. Some use it as a considerably cheaper alternative to rebranding. The unspoken implication here is, “come back and try us again. That last guy who ran this place really sucked, and don’t we know it!”
...It is a habit that we all have. We automatically blame the last person in our role for the lousy service, the cruddy cornbread, the bad haircut, or the extra long wait in line. When new management walks in, owners expect immediate turn around and excellence, employees assume they will have new loads of work dumped on them, and customers expect a considerable improvement on whatever their last experience was.
The thing is: you can only reap what you sow...and a good crop takes time. You aren’t doing anyone any favors (least of all yourself) if you are under the assumption that New Management will automatically repair (or destroy, for that matter) your internal or external problems. Yes, it is possible that Jimmy wasn’t the best Ops guy, but expecting his replacement to make this place sing simply by walking in the door just isn’t realistic. Too often shifts in power occur with the expectation that this will solve all your customer service, or ops, or managerial issues. However, this is but a skin-deep answer to a bone-deep problem. On the surface, for a moment, it may seem to be working, but two weeks in when customers start complaining again, and your service reputation continues to suffer in rants all over Yelp, how do you plan on ultimately resolving the issue?
This is about taking responsibility to give your new management member the best shot at success that you can offer them. This is about building cross-training, exit interviews, and proper checks and balances for smooth transitions into the list of scenarios that you as a business owner need to be prepared for. And, this is about encouraging a culture of, "thank you for your work and your time, we wish you well,” into the flow of your company even in a tense exit. Bad-mouthing an outgoing teammember destroys the concept of personal responsibility for the rest of your team. It reveals your strategy of having a “fall guy,” and will only encourage team members to follow suit.
Let’s say Jimmy wasn’t the best Ops guy you’ve ever had... might there still have been compounding reasons for his repeated failure instead of success? What other factors in play were outside of his control making it more difficult or functionally impossible for Jimmy to succeed? Perhaps Jimmy wasn’t the primary issue of your internal struggles at all.
Many a time we have seen these kind of cancers eating away at companies with mystifyingly high turn-over rates. Management clean-outs come with such frequency the new team might as well be seen as disposable towels used to mop up the mess of the last guy, and then thrown out just as swiftly when very little change is accomplished (again).
If this is your reality, chances are what you have is not a personnel problem but a systems problem. The raisins are baked in; if you don’t want raisin bread, you’re gonna need to start over with new ingredients. Not new employees, necessarily, but a different fundamental understanding of where the power lies within your organization and how to shift it.
Peter Senge, in his book The Fifth Discipline, recounts a time when a executive he was training realized mid-exercise that he had been using power transer to try and fix a systemic problem.
“I’ll never forget the president of a large trucking firm sitting back, wide-eyed, staring at the beer game charts. At the next break, he ran to the telephones. ‘What happened?’ I asked when he returned.
“‘Just before we came here,’ he said, ‘my top management team had concluded a three-day review of operations. One of our divisions had tremendously unstable fluctuations in fleet usage. It seemed pretty obvious that the division president didn’t have what it took to get the job done. We automatically blamed the man… [During the exercise] it hit me that the problems were probably structural, not personal. I just dashed out to call our corporate headquarters and cancel his termination process.’”
Don't let the easy-out undermine your future growth. By keeping your transfers of power healthy and focused on the systems instead of the individuals you will build a resilient and structurally sound company. And take better care of your team and your customers while you're at it.