“In reality, she will only ever be the Twitter COO for Musk; at worst, Musk’s executive PA,” my colleague Lila MacLellan quoted one PR expert as saying, when trouble was brewing a few months into the job.
I spoke with some experts this week about the unique challenges of being in such situations and how best to handle them. The first step is to set clear expectations and boundaries so that you have an option to leave with your reputation intact, CEO advisors told me.
You try to build trust and may have to tolerate sharing the spotlight with a predecessor who continues to linger down the hall. (A familiar refrain in some family-owned companies.) “It’s okay if the founder has a voice on certain topics. But if everyone still looks to the predecessor for leadership, that’s a problem,” Constantine Alexandrakis, CEO of Russell Reynolds Associates said.
