Transitions · 3 min read
What no one tells you about executive transitions
I started my career in banking, 14 years across Barclays and Citibank, before spending the rest of my career building people functions across the UAE, the wider Middle East, and Asia. Most recently, I was the founding Chief People Officer at Traveazy Group, where I built the function from scratch and helped lead the organization through growth to more than 350 employees, a global pandemic, and two mergers.
I’m not sharing that history to establish credentials for their own sake. I’m sharing it because it’s the source of everything I now believe about executive transitions, and most of what I believe didn’t come from a book. It came from being in the room, repeatedly, while people navigated the exact inflection points my clients are navigating now.
Here’s the first thing 25 years taught me: the technical part of a transition is rarely the hard part.
When Traveazy was scaling, we had frameworks for almost everything, hiring plans, org design, compensation structures, integration playbooks for the mergers. Frameworks matter. But I watched, again and again, that the leaders who struggled during that growth weren’t struggling with the frameworks. They were struggling with who they had to become to hold the next size of the company. A founder who’d built the business on instinct and speed suddenly needed to lead through structure and delegation, and that identity shift was harder for them than any org redesign.
The second thing: transitions rarely announce themselves as identity work. They arrive disguised as operational problems. “We need a better leadership team.” “This restructuring is taking too long.” “I can’t get my direct reports to own their decisions.” Underneath almost every one of those statements, when you sit with it long enough, is a leader who hasn’t yet grown into the next version of themselves that the role now requires. The org chart changed faster than the person leading it.
I saw this with painful clarity through Covid. Nobody’s playbook accounted for what we went through. What got teams through wasn’t the contingency plan, though we had one. It was whether the leaders at the top could tolerate genuine uncertainty without either freezing or overcorrecting into control. Some could. Some couldn’t, not because they lacked competence, but because their sense of themselves as leaders was built on having answers, and Covid didn’t offer many.
The mergers taught me something related. A merger is, on paper, a legal and operational event. In practice, it’s an identity event for everyone involved, for the people whose team no longer exists as it did, for the leader whose authority just got redrawn, for the culture that has to absorb another culture without losing itself entirely. The organizations that integrated well weren’t the ones with the cleanest process documents. They were the ones where leadership had done enough internal work to hold complexity and ambiguity without needing to resolve it prematurely just to feel in control again.
This is what I bring to the Scaling Leader clients I work with now: senior executives and founders across the GCC who are navigating real growth, restructuring, or a leadership transition. I’m not coming to this as an outside consultant theorizing about change management. I built a people function through the exact kind of growth and disruption many of my clients are living through right now, and I know from direct experience that the org design is the visible ten percent of the work.
The other ninety percent is quieter. It’s the leader learning to trust a team they used to do everything themselves. It’s the executive stepping into a bigger mandate who still, somewhere, feels like the person who got lucky rather than the person who earned it. It’s the founder realizing that the instincts that built the company are not the same instincts that will scale it, and grieving that a little, even while being excited about what’s next.
None of this shows up on a strategy slide. But after 25 years across banking floors, boardrooms, and a company I helped build from the ground up, I can say with real confidence that it’s the part that determines whether a transition actually succeeds or just gets survived. My work now is to help leaders do that quieter, harder part deliberately, instead of leaving it to chance the way most organizations still do.