A Clean Slate vs Managing a legacy

During the course of my career, most roles came in either one of these two flavors:

• Manage a legacy: Take over or work in a department/ business function that already has a team with pre-defined roles, responsibilities, and KPIs. Most of the time you will have to carry with you the burden of heightened expectations if that business unit has done well in the past, or the burden of setting things right if the business unit was making losses or was not performing well.
• A clean state: Such a business unit has never existed in the firm or it was present with a different set of expectations and you are the one starting it or revising it based on new expectations. You are creating something new and there is no baggage to carry.

Frankly, if someone asked me a few years back, I would have gone with a clean slate rather than working in a legacy environment. But now, I learned the answer is not so simple.

In this article, I will list the top five lessons I learned whilst being part of and managing both newly created business units or existing ones.

Lesson number 1:

There will always be baggage to carry

Perhaps the most important lesson I learned, you will always be carrying some form of baggage. Some of the examples of baggage in both cases are as follows:

• Legacy: An angry customer leftover from the previous administration, un-kept promises from the previous person holding your current position which you know for a fact cannot be kept.
• Clean slate: I have seen these initiatives have much bigger baggage than Legacy. Simply because if a firm is investing in something new it means that they have seen potential in that venture either because the competition is making good revenue out of it or because there is a demand from existing customers for such a service.

It is important to understand that whichever role you take there will always be baggage to carry. Accepting it is the first task that will set you on the path to professional success.

Lesson Number 2:

You will not get the resources you need to achieve your goals

My Mentor who also happens to be my boss always has this dialogue whenever I crib about lack of resources. ” If I had all the resources with the right skill-sets and all the tools to achieve the goals, why would I need you?”

You have been given this role for a reason. If the firm had all the resources in place then they would not need you. You are supposed to be the Ace of spades which negates these factors which prevent the firm from achieving its goals. But this problem of lack of resources will rear its head in very different ways in legacy and clean slate business units:

• Legacy: Most of the time you will find lots of resources; just not the resources you need. Either these resources will be lacking in skills or will be found wanting in buying into your vision. In this scenario, you will face a rather arduous task either in re-training or making sure the team buys into the vision. Make no mistake, this is a very important task; If you are unable to make them understand your end vision and get them trained on the skills to achieve the same, you will never reach the end goal
• A Clean Slate: The organization has put its weight around you in this new venture. But there will always be that confusion or that slight nag in the corner of their brains about the success. How much ever literature and case studies come out saying how firms bet their entire house lock, stock, and barrel and succeeded, all enterprises want to protect themselves from the downsides. So cautious investment means you will not get the resources you want at least initially. Make do with what you have and work towards building confidence in the system.

Lesson Number 3:

You may not have been the first choice for the role, It’s ok!

Sometimes you may have been the second or even the third choice. But remember you were the last and final choice. Take the role and make it your own. But not being the first choice might hurt you especially in the initial days. Mitigating it is key if you want to have success in your role. How it can be done varies depending on the type of business unit:

• Legacy: If the search process is known or that you are the fifth leader to take up the position in as many months then prepare for snide comments from the underlings. This is a bigger problem to worry about than wondering why you were the fifth choice. The choice has been made and you said yes to it. The task is hard enough without us wallowing in self-pity and massaging our wounded ego on why we were the fifth or even the tenth choice. Move on. Give confidence to the team that you were the right choice and with you they can achieve their KPIs and thus you can aid them in their career path.
• Clean Slate: This is a little bit tricky. Not only do you have to do the above task which the legacy guys have to do you have one more important task. Most of the times Clean Slate projects are not taken up by those who are leading highly successful business verticals. They have a sweet little cushion and they will only plan on incremental growth. If you are taking up an unproven clean slate project you are either a hot-shot trying to prove yourself or you are coming out of a previous failed assignment/project and you have a compulsive need to prove yourself. In this scenario, it’s even more important to build trust not just with the team but also with the top management. For that, Lesson 4 is important.

Lesson Number 4:

Short Term or Immediate results matter.

Don’t go searching for that elusive whale. You will get that big-ticket win eventually. Instead, focus on those short-term victories which give oxygen to your team and confidence in your team from the senior leaders within the organization. This is done for different reasons depending on whether you are in a legacy or a clean slate department:

• Legacy: If you are joining a department that has not fared well lately short term wins will energize the team and create a positive vibe within the team which will help you bring them together and bind them together as a team, also it will ingratiate yourself with the team. If the department has been doing well, immediate results will show that you are keeping up the momentum and will again bode well for you
• Clean Slate: Short-term results are not nice to have. It is a must-have. You do not have past success or failures on which you can ride or place the blame. Short-term or Immediate results define and set the tone for the future. Too much delay in showing some form of success then you will be spending more time explaining to the senior management why your business unit is important rather than focusing on the end goals. This means you have less time focusing on your goals and more time struggling to keep your ship intact. Short-term success prevents that from happening. Whilst showing that you have a long-term future is good, remember that’s the reason why your business unit was created in the first place. But your senior leaders need results. Immediate results will give that comfort required for you to pursue your larger time-consuming goals.

Lesson Number 5:

Real success is success without you

So you have built success. You have achieved all your KPIs and heck, you have even surpassed them. Now it’s time to move on. But lasting success is if you can look back 5-10 years down the line and say “Hey, I built that!” In order to do so you must avoid these pitfalls:

• Legacy: Make sure you have set up or created processes in place which will stay on after you have left. This means not just creating processes on a piece of paper but making sure the team has imbibed those values. One of the best ways to make sure that the values aren’t lost is to elevate one of the team members themselves as the successor. This means you will have a predictable manager to follow you in your footsteps
• Clean Slate: Make sure the momentum doesn’t start and stop with you. Create process-oriented action points from the beginning itself. Your grit and determination will only get you to a certain place. The business process must take over at some point. I have explained this process and my thoughts on this in one of my previous blogs.

So Clean Slate vs Managing a legacy. What has been your experience on this front? Add your lessons learned in the comments section.