Inevitably executives that fail to onboard successfully into new jobs do so for one of three reasons. They don’t fit. They don’t deliver. Or they don’t adjust to changes down the road. Today Show Executive Producer Jamie Horowitz got fired 60 days into the job because “this is not the right fit.”
Change agents face three types of audiences: contributors, detractors and watchers. The basic prescription is to lead with the contributors and get them to enroll some of the watchers while getting the detractors out of the way. Instead, Horowitz created new detractors (Morales and Geist) who enrolled watchers (like Lauer) in their resistance.
The lesson is to converge into the organization before trying to evolve it. Fit. Deliver. Adjust.
