You Inherit More Than a Title

August 15, 2026

Read Time - 5 minutes

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”

~William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, 1951

A dean I coached was called “aggressive” by her faculty in her first year.

She was baffled when it got back to her. She had always been direct, and her old colleagues would have used the same word and meant it as praise. What she hadn't accounted for was the seven years before her. Her predecessor avoided conflict. Her faculty had learned to expect ambiguity, to let whoever pushed hardest win, and to work together only when they had to. So, when she asked a committee to decide something by the end of the week, it landed like a fist on the table.

An associate dean I worked with had the opposite problem. He followed a man who had held the job eleven years, walked the hallway every morning, and knew the hobbies and family members of most faculty. This associate dean was better at the operational half of the work by any measure, and more comfortable with it. In his first semester he rebuilt the course-scheduling process, which had been costing faculty time and headaches.

But by spring, the words coming back to him were “we never see him” and “he's very corporate.” He answered email within the day, which his predecessor never did. He just answered from his office instead of standing in someone's doorway.

I don't think either complaint was really about them. Both were describing the person who left.

A First Year Leadership Lens

The leadership style of whoever held our job before us becomes the lens our own leadership gets viewed through, at least for that first year. We aren't evaluated in the abstract, because nobody evaluates anyone in the abstract. Our teams read us against the most recent version of this job they know. If you follow someone who wouldn't decide, then ordinary decisiveness can read as aggression. Follow someone whose personality filled the room, and your quieter style can seem distant.

This is more than a feeling people have. Hui Zhao and colleagues, writing in the Journal of Applied Psychology, studied 203 employees across 22 teams during a leadership handoff and found that the departing leader's style measurably shaped how people responded to the new one. In your first year, you're graded on a curve set by someone else.

And, of course, the challenge is that nobody sits you down and says: here is how your predecessor led and what this unit expects, and here is where your leadership style is going to cause friction.

That would take all of the fun out of leading, right?

4 Things You Can Do About It

Working this out early is the difference between spending year one leading and spending it defending yourself. So, here are four actions that can help:

1. Learn what you're replacing, before you need to. When that unexpected feedback arrives, the instinct is to argue with it. Instead, try to find out what people got used to. Ask people who have been there longer than you: How did decisions usually get made? What did people count on the last leader for? What did they have to work around? Michael Watkins, who wrote The First 90 Days, built his whole transition framework on this premise, that the situation you inherit should dictate your strategy, and that the most common failure is importing the approach that worked in your last job.

2. Translate the adjective. When a word comes back about you, it arrives sounding like a description of your character. It's more likely a description of the distance between you and the person who had the job before you, and that is something you can actually work on.

So translate the adjective you were labeled with. Aggressive compared to whom? If the answer is a chair who took a full semester to decide anything, then aggressive means faster, and pace is something you can explain. Cold compared to whom? If the last person ran the unit through hallway conversations, then cold means you use email, and that is a channel you can change. Disorganized compared to whom? Usually it means you brought a different system than the one people already learned.

None of this makes the word disappear. What it does is turn unhelpful feedback into something constructive. It's hard to decide how to be “less aggressive,” but explaining a decision before announcing it? That we can do.

3. Say your rules out loud instead of letting people guess them. Right now your faculty are working out how you operate from the handful of decisions they have watched you make, and they are interpreting every one of them against the last person. That's a small sample and a bad reference point.

So be explicit and share how you decide: what you will settle on your own, what goes to a vote, what you will bring to them before it is decided. What's important to you. What values guide your decisions. What you want to hear about early. What you don't need to hear about.

Say it in a leadership meeting, then put it somewhere people can find it again. Some of them will not believe you until they watch you follow it three or four times. That's fine. What matters is that they now have something to check you against besides your predecessor or their own interpretations of the few decisions they've seen you make.

4. Turn “the last leader always did X” into a question. You will hear that sentence, probably in your first month, and it will arrive sounding like a complaint. Underneath it is usually a request.

So ask what X gave them. If the answer to “she always walked the halls in the morning” is that people got a chance to raise something small before it turned into something large, you have learned what to supply. You may have no intention of walking the halls. You can still open the first ten minutes of every faculty meeting for exactly that, or keep office hours nobody has to schedule.

The Bottom Line

Leadership is not a set of right answers. Very little of it is. It is relative. The same decision that makes you effective in one department would make you an outsider in another, and the style your old colleagues called steady gets called distant three hundred miles away. That is not a flaw in you, and it is not a failure in them. It is what happens when you lead real people who share a history you were not part of.

Which is why the questions matter more than the answers. What did people get used to here? What is this word being measured against? Have I ever actually said out loud how I work? Not one of those requires you to be right about anything. They just require you to be curious.

The answers to those questions matter because they change how you interpret the feedback. You hear it as information about the place you are leading rather than a verdict on the kind of person you are. That makes it less personal and gives you something you can actually use.

It also does not last. In my experience the comparisons fade faster than they feel like they will, because people eventually have enough of their own experience of you to stop borrowing someone else's. And then one day you leave, and someone new walks into a unit that measures them against you.

Which is the part worth working toward. Someday you are the baseline. The questions you ask this fall are how you become one worth measuring against.

Try This Before Friday

Ask three people who worked closely with your predecessor, one at a time: what is something they did that you will miss?

Then you can decide how to meet that need in your own way.

Thanks for reading today. I'll see you next week.

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