Leadership term limits

I’ve just been through a career transition that reminds me of something I realized as a newbie just out of school many years ago: leaders shouldn’t serve forever.

I served as the director of my computer center for five years. During that time we made a lot of changes (I think for the better), expanded our business into new areas, and developed a lot of new talent.

I tend to like a change of scenery fairly regularly, and I’ve just shifted my responsibilities with the result that there’s a new director in the computer center. When I’ve changed jobs in the past it’s involved an organizational change so that I wasn’t involved with my old organization any more. This time, however, I’m still around and I get to see the impact on my previous organization. It’s been fascinating.

The new director is doing a swell job, and is someone we developed from within. What I’ve seen him do in his first few months though reinforces the idea that leaders shouldn’t be in charge of the same organization forever. It’s obvious that bad leaders shouldn’t stay in leadership positions — in fact, ideally they shouldn’t ever get into a leadership position.

But my leadership term limits apply to good leaders as well. Here’s why: new ideas and blind spots.

New blood

It is inevitable that when you start a new leadershp role — even in the same organization — you come in fresh ideas and a new perspective. This brings an energy to your fulfillment of your role. Others can see that energy, and provided you are a reasonably effective leader, will begin to feed off it. Enthusiasm is contagious, and new ideas bring an energy that sparks the imagination of everyone around you.

People wake up under new (effective) leadership, and the difference moves the organization forward.

Once you’ve been in the job long enough to be comfortable in it and to have accomplished the big ticket things on your agenda, you begin to lose your enthusiasm. You tend to let successful programs continue, and you generally aren’t strongly motivated to displace successful programs you started, even after they are no longer the best way to get things done. At this point you might be doing a good job of managing, but you probably aren’t doing a good job leading, and it’s time to move on.

This is all natural, and most people experience these changes. They don’t make you a bad leader.

What can make you a bad leader is to not respond to the changes, and you have two choices. You can wake yourself up, and try to capture some of that energy and enthusiasm you brought into the role at the beginning. (One way to do this is to push your organization’s mission into a new area, or deveop a new line of business.) Or you can move on, and let someone else’s energy carry the organization forward.

Blind spots

The other strong reason to move on after you’ve had the helm of an organization for a while is that you begin to develop blind spots.

There are problems that you start to not see anymore. Either they’ve been resistant to solutions you’ve already tried and you’re ready to give up and pretend they’re not there anymore, or they are problems that are in an area of the organization that you stopped paying attention to because it’s always “just worked.”

In the short run blind spots aren’t a big deal but, like any organizational problem, if left unresolved they can create long term problems for you down the road. That minor personnel problem in customer service will probably blow over again just like it has the past 3 times, but the rest of the staff is getting worn down dealing with this “little” problem that no one will do anything about. Pretty soon customer satisfaction is tanking and you’re trying to figure out why.

The solution? Move on.

Here’s my proposed solution: good leaders get five years, and then they have to move on to another leadership role.

Why five? Well, in my industry segment five years is enough time to come in, create significant change and grow new business areas to add value. It’s also enough time for the projects you started when you took over to become sacred cows, and for your blind spots to be in full bloom.

The number might be different in your industry segment, either shorter or longer. And there are probably exceptions to the rule; leaders who are so capable or who are working in an area so specialized that it would be disastrous to move them out. The idea probably also doesn’t work iun really small organizations; you probably need at least 100 people and several teams for this to make sense. But, in general, I think leadership term limits are a pretty solid idea.

And there’s a very strong side benefit for your organization: new leaders. If the guy in charge knows he’s going to rotate to another leadership assignment in 5 years, he’ll know he’s got to develop the next leader to take over from him. This leads to the creation of a whole new corps of leaders in your company on a regular basis.