Outliving the Change Agent

Every once in a while, a new stakeholder joins an account with a clear agenda: signal change. The pitch to their CEO is predictable. Everything the previous team was doing was inefficient. They have a better way. They will fix it.

I am not always questioning the intention. Sometimes the diagnosis is right. But when that conclusion arrives in the first few weeks, before anyone has spent real time understanding the system, the workflows, or the reasoning behind decisions, it is not an assessment. It is positioning. And it costs us accounts.

The stakeholders who actually drive improvement tend to do it differently. They work within the system first. They flag inefficiencies, propose changes, and push for them through the right channels. They reserve the call for replacement when something is genuinely broken and widely acknowledged as such. These people also tend to stick around long enough to see whether the change they drove actually produced a meaningful outcome.

The change agents rarely do. Two years at one company, two years at another, always arriving mid-story and leaving before the last chapter. If your core job is to initiate change but not to live through its results, that is a pattern worth noticing. And for us, if we can hold our position in these accounts through that cycle, stay useful, stay operational, and simply wait, we tend to retain them once the dust settles. The account survives the disruption. We just have to outlive the change agent.