execute the handover, or keep planning it?
“It is VERY important that you call…”
… it was the late 80’s, and “cell phones” were the size of a suitcase. My boss had decided in the middle of a critical phase of our project to buy a new boat in Florida, and drive it up the Intracoastal waterway to Virginia. And… later we would figure out he dropped the phone when it hit a big wave… and with that, I was in charge.
…the plan you have never actually executed…
You have had the conversation about stepping back 3 times now. You have a document. What you do not have is 1 thing that left your hands this quarter and stayed gone. Which piece of your job could you name, today, that somebody else now owns outright?
Planning a handover is comfortable work. It feels like progress and it costs nothing, which is exactly why a leader can do it for years.
a producer made the call, and the band that exists is the one he called
In 1995 a producer named Matt Serletic went to the singer of an Orlando bar band and offered to sign him to his production company: Rob Thomas, Brian Yale and Paul Doucette, not for the group he was playing in. They had to replace the guitarists. Serletic brought in Kyle Cook and Adam Gaynor. Now set, he produced the debut himself, and the band that sold 12 million copies of its first record… pieces of other groups.
…then they executed on a name every one of them hated…
The name came from Doucette, waiting tables, looking at a man’s softball shirt. A patch reading “Matchbox”, a number 20 on the back, and that was it. The rest of them thought it was the dumbest name in the world and said so. They used it anyway, and about a month later everybody had stopped noticing. 30 years on it is on the front of a catalog that has outlasted almost everything released beside it. Half of executing is being willing to go with the decision nobody in the room loves.
A handover you can take back is a loan, and everybody in the room knows the difference.
…a Succession executed is never a tidy thing…
Hold both halves of that story, because we usually only want the first one. It was decisive, it was right about the music, and it built something that has lasted 3 decades. It was also a handover done to people rather than with them, and the 2 men left behind carried it a long way. Every real Succession I have watched execute properly had somebody in it who did not get the seat, and how that was handled is the part people still remember 10 years later.
Push is what came out the other side. It went to number 1 on Modern Rock and number 3 on pop airplay, and it never charted the Hot 100 at all, because there was no single to buy. The song that broke them is missing from the chart that supposedly counts. The scoreboard and the result are not the same thing, and anybody who has run a handover against a quarterly target already knows it.
The look on our finance person’s face said it all… Call who??? And real panic. We were a small team of 10 – a “Start Up” inside of IBM, trying to navigate the behemoth bureaucracy before they killed it. And now – at 31, I was in charge for 2 weeks – THE 2 weeks we had to actually ship something. But you know… I strangely knew what to do… and this was the Push I needed. “Often wrong, never in doubt” would serve me again.
What would you execute this week, if the plan were finished?
The plan is finished. It has been finished for months. Pick 1 thing, name it out loud to the person taking it, put it in writing so there is no ambiguity about who owns it on Monday, and then leave it alone even when they do it differently from you. Especially then.
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: hand 1 thing over this week, in writing, and leave it handed over. Do not take it back.
Figuring out which thing goes first, and how to say it to the person who does not get it, is most of what a good hour looks like. Schedule time with me here.
Hand it over this week and then keep your hands off it, however hard you have to… Push
