Best practices in Human Resources mean that position rotation has genuine benefit for a company. It permits staff the opportunity to expand their area of experience. It creates workers who can more easily grasp the bigger picture of the business. It generally creates a more flexible business. This rotation between positions can be compared to a military tour of duty, where an infantryman is stationed somewhere for a period and is then reassigned. However, these company tours of duty can have a downside for the business change pro.
Business change initiatives are typically long term, even multi-year, projects that require extensive integration and intense coordination between the mid-level, upper-level, the backing of somebody at the executive level to loan satisfactory authority to keep a change project moving forward. So what happens when your friendly executive’s tour of action to an end and there’s still a year left to complete the project?
In the worst case eventuality, the business change initiative come to a grinding halt while the new executive settles into their new position and decides if they need to lend their support to the project. If they do not wish to continue lending support, the one thing to do is go hunting for another friend at the executive level. This, naturally, is the actual thing to work to avoid. There some things that can be done to keep the executive support in place whether or not the executive changes.
Make it a point to find out what kind of official, or unofficial, rotation policies exist and where the key executive player is on the rotation. If their tour is going to up previous to the end of the project, ask them if they know who their replacement will be. If the politics permit it, begin to bring the new executive to cruising speed on the project before they take the new position. Alternately, ask the outgoing executive to bring the new executive up to speed. Either way, this permits the new person to hit the ground running the business change in terms of the business change underway.