There’s a version of executive onboarding that almost never gets written about, probably because it looks so easy from the outside. Whether it’s the CFO succeeding the CEO, or the COO stepping into the corner office when the founder decides to retire, everyone already knows everyone. No awkward first meetings, no learning the org chart from scratch, no wondering who actually gets things done around here.
I’d argue it’s one of the harder transitions there is.
Two very different sets of expectations
Think about what actually happens the moment that a promotion to CEO is announced. The board or the ownership group is signaling two things at once: we trust you, and we expect something to change. Fair enough. That is often why the promotion happened in the first place, especially after a private equity deal closes and the thesis behind it assumes growth.
But the team you’re now leading was just handed a new boss who, until last quarter, sat in their meetings as a peer. They built this business. They know exactly how hard they worked to get it to a place where it was worth acquiring. And now they’re being asked to trust that the person who used to sit beside them respects all of that, even while pushing for change.
Nobody says any of this out loud in week one. It shows up three months later, when meetings get quieter and people stop volunteering their real opinions.
Be mindful of getting the team behind you
A CFO client that I worked with had spent the acquisition process building real credibility with the incoming PE firm. Smart, sharp with the numbers, clearly the right person to run finance through a deal like that. When the deal closed, he was named CEO.
His first instinct was to move. He had strong opinions about what needed to change, and honestly, he was probably right about most of it. So, he started socializing his plans with the leadership team almost immediately.
What he got back wasn’t pushback. Pushback would have been easier to work with. What he got was silence. The team had built the business that had just been sold at a premium, and instead of hearing a vision for where it could go, they heard a verdict on what they’d already done. He noticed the shift, and to his credit, he didn’t dig in. He slowed down and rebuilt how the plan came together, this time with the team shaping it alongside him rather than reacting to it after the fact. The strategy that came out the other side wasn’t dramatically different from where he started. But the team owned it now. That’s the part that actually mattered.
So what do you do differently in this specific situation?
A few things I’d point out to any leader who finds themselves promoted into a room full of former peers.
Start with respect, and mean it specifically. Not a generic thank-you in an all-hands email. Name what the outgoing leader and the team actually built, including the parts that made this business worth acquiring in the first place. Skip this step and everything you say afterward gets filtered through the assumption that you think what came before was wrong.
Bring the team into the direction-setting itself. Before you lock anything in, work through it with them: what are the keepers, the things about this business that got it here and shouldn’t be touched, and what are the real opportunities worth chasing next. People who help build the plan stop treating change as something being done to them.
And don’t confuse respect for the past with timidity about the future. Boards don’t promote from within so you can spend a year listening. They still expect a real plan with real deadlines. The job is holding both at once: being genuinely bold about where the business needs to go, while being specific and public about exactly what you’re choosing to preserve. Say both parts out loud, in the same breath if you can. One without the other reads as either disrespect or as an excuse not to change.
Why this particular chair is harder than it looks
You don’t get to replace this team the way an outside hire sometimes does. They are, in most cases, your only path to the results the board is expecting. Which means the thing you’re managing in year one isn’t really the strategy. It’s whether the people who used to be your peers still want to follow you.
The leaders who pull this off aren’t the fastest movers, and they aren’t the most cautious ones either. They’re the ones who understood, going in, that earning that trust wasn’t a nice-to-have on the way to executing the plan. It was the plan.
