Who Hears First: Announcing a Leadership Transition
A leadership announcement can take months to prepare and be undone in an afternoon. The board signed off on the strategy and the release was carefully weighed, but the wrong person heard at the wrong time, from the wrong source. The sequence had never been treated as the strategy. In our experience of leadership transitions across Southeast Asia, how a change lands depends less on the announcement than on the order in which people hear it. This is the order we would work towards, and where it has to bend. It assumes a planned change of chief executive in a mid-sized or larger organisation, so scale it to fit. Two lists, not one Most transition plans spend their effort on what to say. The harder question is who hears it first, from whom, and how long before everyone else. Two lists decide that. The first is the people most affected by the decision. They should hear it closest to the source, with the most context and the most time before it becomes public. Employees who learn about a...
