What Do You Leave Alone When You Step into Executive Leadership?

You can see exactly where the company needs to go. You have the mandate, you have the ideas, and you have the credibility that got you into the role. The question that tends to sit underneath all of that, and that most leadership frameworks don’t answer directly, is this: what do you not touch?

On a recent episode of Owner’s Roundtable, I talked with Brendan Thompson, the third-generation President of Bernie’s Electric Supplies, a 50-year Edmonton electrical wholesaler. Brendan came up through almost every department in the company before taking the top seat in 2023, and the way he described his approach to the transition clarified something I’ve seen play out in a lot of different businesses.

Listen to the episode here.

The Instinct to Prove Yourself Through Action

When a leader steps into an established organization, the pressure to demonstrate capability is immediate. The organization is watching and the team is forming opinions. The instinct is to move fast, show that something has changed, and establish a direction.

The problem is that an organization’s capacity to absorb change is finite. A leader who spends that capacity on too many things at once, before they’ve built the trust to carry people through it, tends to find the organization managing around them rather than with them.

Brendan’s approach was to start small and win those battles before pushing for anything larger. Choose hills carefully. Keep them small. Build a platform from each success. What looks like patience from the outside is actually sequencing. The leaders who earn the room early, by demonstrating sound judgment in smaller decisions first, are the ones the organization grants the larger decisions to later.

Alignment as Infrastructure

One of the more practical things Brendan described was how he thinks about management alignment. His framework: make it safe to disagree inside the room, and non-negotiable to be aligned outside of it. Whatever gets debated in the leadership meeting stays there. What comes out the other side is a united position.

When a management team is visibly misaligned, the signal travels fast. The floor picks it up. People find the gaps between managers and navigate through them, not always intentionally, but the gaps are there and they get used. Energy that should go into the work goes into managing internal politics instead.

Building that alignment takes longer than most executives expect. The weekly meeting where people feel safe to speak plainly and leave with a shared position is built over months of consistency, not announced in an all-hands. It’s infrastructure, not an event.

Growing People vs Finding Them

When a critical finance role needed to be filled at Bernie’s Electric, Brendan didn’t go to market for someone with 20 years of experience. He found an internal candidate most people would have considered underdeveloped for the position, brought in a fractional CFO as a mentor, and structured the role around that person’s growth. The result was a finance manager who understood the business from the warehouse floor up, and a team that could see a real career path inside the company.

The organizations with the strongest leadership benches tend to have made a deliberate decision to build that bench rather than buy it. They hire for potential, create clear development paths, and invest in the gap between where someone is and where the role needs them to be.

The resistance to this approach is rarely philosophical. Most leaders know it produces better long-term results. The resistance is practical. Developing someone into a role takes time and structure, and the day-to-day urgency of running a business makes both genuinely hard to protect. The decision to do it anyway tends to separate organizations that build lasting leadership capacity from ones that stay dependent on whoever they can recruit from outside.

What Not to Change

The last thing Brendan said in our conversation was the simplest. Get clear early on what you should not put your mark on, because it’s working fine without you.

Most of the energy in a leadership transition goes toward the new. New priorities, new systems, new culture. That work matters. But the organizations that transition well also do an honest inventory of what created 10, 20, or 50 years of staying power, and they treat that as something to build on rather than modernize.

What to Do Next

Executive leadership in an established business requires both: the judgment to change what needs changing, and the discipline to leave alone what doesn’t. The second part is harder to develop and less often talked about. It tends to be what separates the transitions that work from the ones that generate years of recovery.

If you’re working through a leadership transition or building the systems your team needs to execute without you in every decision, the Vision to Execution Scorecard is a useful starting point.

Or if you’re ready for a direct conversation, schedule a call.