There is a question every incoming CEO should ask in their first week. Almost none of them do. Not because they’re incurious or complacent, most CEOs arrive with genuine energy and a real desire to understand the business they’ve taken on. They ask the right questions about financial performance, about the competitive landscape, about the team. They commission reviews. They hold listening sessions. They develop a view.
What they rarely ask is: what does this business mean to the people who choose it and does our strategy reflect that?
It sounds like a soft question. By now, you’ll recognise it isn’t.
The visible and invisible costs of leadership change
When a CEO changes, the visible costs are well understood. The search fee. The onboarding. The “transition”honeymood period” where the CEO is given breathing space, decisions slow and the market watches. The press release, carefully drafted, full of confidence about the future.
What’s less visible, and considerably more expensive, is what happens to the brand in the same period. Because while the board is focused on the leadership transition, the brand is having its own transition. Customers are watching. Long-serving employees are reading signals. Partners and suppliers are reassessing relationships. The market is forming a view about what this business is about to become.
And the incoming CEO, almost by definition, arrives with a point of view that the organisation doesn’t yet share. That’s why they were hired. The gap between their vision and the existing brand reality is not a problem, it’s the starting point for everything that follows. And that gap needs to be managed. Acknowledged. Understood. Not assumed away.
What I see from the boardroom
As a Non-Executive Director, I’ve been close to leadership transitions at listed and private companies. I’ve seen them handled well and I’ve seen them mishandled, and the difference is rarely about the quality of the incoming leader. The ones that go well share a common characteristic: the new CEO treats the existing brand as an asset to understand before they treat it as a constraint to overcome. They spend time with customers, not in organised listening sessions where everyone is on their best behaviour, but in the messy reality of how the business actually operates. They ask employees not what they think the strategy should be, but what they believe the business stands for and whether it lives up to that. They treat the answers as data, even when the data is uncomfortable. This has been particularly well handled at brands like the Co-op, where the brand has a real history and a story to be reimagined for a new generation.
The ones that go less well tend to share a different characteristic: the incoming leader arrives with a clear vision, sometimes a brilliant one, and moves quickly to implement it, without fully understanding what the existing brand has built and why it matters to the people it has built it with. Unlike brands like the Co-op where the ethos is obvious, it’s often easy to think change is the answer, and often that comes with unintended consequences that impair and at worst damage the brand.
The result is a strategy that makes internal sense and external confusion. A market that can see something has changed but can’t quite articulate what. Customers who feel, instinctively, that the business is no longer quite what it was, and who begin, quietly, to explore alternatives. Especially when new entrants arrive speaking the old language.
This is how brand value leaks during leadership transition. Not in a single moment, but in a hundred small signals, each individually dismissible, collectively significant.
The question worth asking
The incoming CEO who wants to avoid this doesn’t need a brand strategy session in week one. They need a single, well-formed question that they hold onto throughout the transition. The question is this: what promise has this business been making to its customers, employees and stakeholders… and am I going to keep it, change it, or replace it?
All three are legitimate answers. Keeping it is right when the brand is strong and the strategy is broadly continuous. Changing it is right when the business needs to evolve its position without losing its foundation. Replacing it is right, occasionally, when the brand has become a liability rather than an asset. But you can’t give an honest answer to the question if you haven’t asked it. And most incoming CEOs haven’t.
The board’s role in this is also worth naming. It is not enough to appoint an excellent CEO and then step back. The board has a responsibility to ensure the transition is managed with the same rigour it would bring to any other significant risk, and the brand dimension of that transition is a risk that belongs on the board agenda, not just the marketing plan.
Leadership changes. Brand, at its best, is the thread of continuity that holds a business together through the change. When that thread is managed well, the transition becomes a moment of renewal. When it’s ignored, it becomes a slow puncture, and by the time anyone notices, it’s already flat.