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How Homer's second hero reveals what leadership transitions teach us about brand, identity, and inheritance.
I've been reading The Odyssey, and while Odysseus gets most of the attention, right now I’m more interested in the story of Telemachus. He is the son left behind. Growing up in the shadow of a father he barely knows, surrounded by people who know the story of Odysseus better than he knows the man himself.
When we meet him, Telemachus has inherited the name, the household under pressure with resources being squandered away by men vying for his mother and all of the other dramatic tension that comes with his inheritance.
The problem is that an inheritance doesn't tell you what todo with it. If life were to be a game, the next move in unknown; sometimes unimaginable. In my world this feels familiar.
How’s that?
We often work with companies in transition. Founders step away. Businesses are acquired and rolled-up or restructured. Leadership changes. Organizations that were once relatively simple become multi-company,multi-location operations. And almost every time, the transition reveals something that was sort-of invisible before. How much of the company's identity belonged to the person or the team who was leading it?
The founder's instincts became strategy. The executive leadership’s vision became the north star. Their goals became the company's goals.Their future the company’s future. With preferences and ways of seeing that shaped the culture. Their reputation influenced how customers, employees and partners understood the business.
Over time, the line between the leader and the institution became difficult to discern. Lack of coherence isn’t obvious. Until the drivingforce is longer there. Then the lights start coming up and everything is revealed.
But regardless of all that, the people often remain.Sometimes, these are the best and the brightest. They’ve been there for years,their sons and daughters have been there for years. These are people who not only work for a company, they deeply believe in a company. In a future.
In a vision.
Transitions in leadership or ownership tend to be approached as operational events. Consultancy style. Devoid of emotion. With reportingstructures to establish, financial targets to evaluate, processes to assess and new decisions to make.
New leadership is often brought in with an explicit mandate to improve the business. Find efficiencies. Reduce costs. Integrate operations.Eliminate redundancies. All of that may be necessary.
But the problem is that a new leadership team can understand the business on paper long before it understands the institution in practice. That difference matters.
This is something that continues to surprise me in our work.Even if it shouldn’t.
Leadership can know the numbers, the organizational structure, the customers and the growth plan while having a remarkably limitedunderstanding of why the company works the way it does.
Especially when it comes to people.
In multi-unit companies, the real organization rarely looks exactly like the organizational chart. People have spent years learning how towork across locations, companies and functions. They know who to call when something needs to get done. They know which relationships matter. They knowhow information moves and where it gets stuck.
Over time, those relationships become their own kind of infrastructure. And infrastructure is easy to overlook when it's working.
One of the risks of leadership transition is that the people making decisions about the future often didn't participate in building the systems that made the past work. They can see the mechanism without understanding its function. A recurring meeting looks unnecessary until you realize it is the only place leaders from different business units consistently exchange information.
An internal event looks like an expense until you understand that it is one of the few things creating relationships across a decentralized organization.
A communications program looks expendable until you discover it is how employees, separated by hundreds of miles, feel connected to the larger company and feel seen or acknowledged for their work.
A long-tenured employee can look expensive on a spreadsheet until you realize how much institutional knowledge and trust walks out the door with them.
The spreadsheet can tell you what something costs. It cannot always tell you what it holds together. Something especially important in the kinds of businesses we spend a lot of time around: construction, industrial services, infrastructure and other people-dependent organizations.
These companies run on expertise, certainly. But they also run on relationships.
People carry knowledge that has never been properly documented.They carry customer history. They carry context behind decisions that might otherwise make no sense. They know who can solve a particular problem and who needs to be brought into the conversation before it becomes one.
They carry trust across the organization. That trust may have taken years to build and minutes to disrupt.
None of this is an argument against change. Leadership transitions should create opportunities to question things. Acquisitions should surface redundancies. Growing companies should rethink systems that no longer serve them. New leaders should have the freedom to lead rather than spend their tenure preserving someone else's preferences.
The danger isn't change. The danger is changing something you don't yet understand.
There is a temptation in any transition to demonstrate momentum. New leadership wants to establish authority. Investors want to see progress. The organization has been told that a new chapter is beginning, and everyone is waiting to see what that means.
Before you decide what something should become, you have to understand what made it what it is. The narrator of The Odyssey opens the story with a simple instruction: "Find the beginning." Leadership transitions deserve the same discipline.
Before deciding what needs to change, leadership needs to interpret what it has inherited. Which parts of the culture are intentional,and which parts developed organically because they solved a real problem?
Which relationships have become critical to how the organization operates? Which traditions are nostalgia, and which are reinforcing something important? Which systems are truly inefficient, and which only appear inefficient because their value is difficult to quantify? What belonged to the founder? And what began with the founder but has since become part of the company itself?
Those aren't branding questions or culture questions oroperational questions in isolation. They're questions about the institution. And answering them requires curiosity before judgment.
The challenge for new leadership is not to preserve everything that came before. That would be its own kind of failure.
Organizations have to evolve. Leadership has to make decisions appropriate to the company as it exists today and where it intends togo tomorrow. But inheritance requires interpretation.
You have to understand why something exists before you can intelligently decide whether it should continue to exist. You have to understand what people value before you dismiss it as resistance to change. You have to understand how trust moves through an organization before you start reorganizing the pathways it travels through. And you have to understand what made the company worth inheriting before you begin improving it.
That may be what I find so interesting about Telemachus.
His inheritance gives him a history, but it cannot give him an identity. He has to understand the world his father created without spendinghis life trying to recreate it. Leadership transitions ask something similar of companies.
The goal isn't to preserve the person who came before. Noris it to prove the new leader is different. It's to understand what was built, recognize what is worth carrying forward and create enough room for something new to emerge.
Because the greatest risk in a leadership transition may not be changing too much. It may be changing what you never understood in the first place.
