Sophy Pern
September 2026
Too often we hear: “Let’s postpone the thinking on organisation, the team meeting or the alignment session until the new leader has had more time to settle in.”
We almost accept the prolonged phase of “wait and see” as inevitable: a period of polite postponement that can stretch over months, sometimes years, with material consequences for strategic decision-making and the organisation’s ability to execute.
Does it really have to take that long? No is the short answer.
The cost of waiting is real. While everyone is being polite, decisions drift, difficult questions go unasked and momentum melts away. And yet the delay is rarely inevitable. More often it is a default that nobody has actually chosen.
In this piece we look at one transition that took days rather than months, and at what made the difference. The short version: someone other than the leader chose to design it, with the board and the CPO acting as active stewards rather than polite bystanders.
What Is Actually Happening in a Leadership Transition?
Transitions are frequently treated as a personal challenge for the incoming leader to manage. There is real value for the individual in being deliberate about the first 90 days (Watkins, 2003). However, focusing only on the individual misses an important dimension. As well as being individual processes, transitions are a collective organisational process.
A Biotech Example: Compressing the Clock
Take the example of an incoming CEO in a VC-backed biotech. By chance rather than design, the start date coincided with a pre-planned leadership team meeting. It would have been easy, indeed entirely defensible, to postpone or cancel the meeting and allow a more cautious “wait and see” period to play out.
Instead, a deliberate choice was made to go ahead and use the time to accelerate both the onboarding and the re-formation of the leadership team, with him clearly in the role of leader.
Within a 24-hour window, the CEO and the team were able to:
- Create a good ending for the outgoing CEO
- Surface and address the most significant questions around the transition
- Set practical steps in motion around strategy and execution
By the end of his first week, the CEO was already the legitimate leader of the executive team, something that under more typical circumstances might have taken weeks or months.
What made the difference?
Three things stand out.
1) The conversation about transition was brought into the open
Early, collective conversation about the transition accelerated effectiveness and impact, shrinking the “wait and see” phase from weeks and months to hours and days. This required a deliberate choice about how to architect the transition, made by someone other than the leader himself.
In this case the chief people officer, working with the board, played a critical role. Transitions benefit from intentional architecture- not just through the lens of the incoming leader. Boards and CPOs- take note.
2) Readiness and resolve
Launching into a collective conversation about transition in the first week of a new role is potentially a risky strategy, and required a certain amount of chutzpah on behalf of the leader. However, it would be disingenuous to reduce it to this. This leader had already done substantial thinking about his own transition and had confidence in his ability to hold the group and the room. Postponing this conversation out of politeness or precaution would have prolonged uncertainty for everyone.
Put simply: the more ready a leader is, the more courage they can muster to support the collective transition.
3) Endings were honoured as well as beginnings
Including the outgoing leader was an important choice, which created psychological closure. It signalled continuity where it mattered and freed the system to move forward. Skipping this step would have left unresolved loyalties and unspoken comparisons, which slow everything down.
A simple but important choice. Acknowledging endings is part of every good beginning.
Conclusion: Choosing Not to Wait
Transitions do not have to drag. The biotech CEO was the legitimate leader of his team within a week- not through luck, but through three deliberate choices: bringing the conversation into the open, backing a leader who was ready, and honouring endings as well as beginnings.
None of these choices is complicated. What they require is someone willing to make them. Too often the default is to defer: to protect the new leader, to be polite, to give it time. But deferral has a cost, and it is the organisation that pays it.
So the next time you hear “let’s wait until the new leader has settled in”, it is worth asking a different question: what would it take to help them settle in faster?
Boards and CPOs are well placed to ask that question- and to answer it. The leader brings readiness and resolve. Those around them bring the design, the timing and the permission to move.
When that happens, the first weeks of a new leader’s tenure become a launch pad rather than a holding pattern. Momentum is kept rather than lost, and the organisation moves forward exactly when it matters most. In a companion piece, we look at how to design transitions deliberately, through the lenses of time, fair exchange and membership.
