When a company changes course, one thing usually happens. The leader is replaced. A new CEO or director who fits the new phase, and the sense that the change is now underway. But beneath that new leader sits an entire team that was not replaced. The top fits the new season, the team still fits the old one. Most transformations stall in that gap, and it is rarely named.
That is the heart of The Seasonal Team, the new whitepaper by interim-CEO and executive search partner Ineke Kooistra, available today at intermanage.nl. It is the sequel to The Seasonal Leader, which was about the leader. This one is about the step almost everyone skips, carrying the change from a new leader down into the team beneath.
The idea behind it is simple. A company moves through phases, and each phase rewards different behaviour. Building fast from nothing asks for something other than scaling, and scaling asks for something other than a market that suddenly turns against you. Kooistra calls those phases seasons. Someone who shines in one season can struggle in the next, not because they became worse, but because the work began to ask for something else.
And that is where it goes wrong, Kooistra says. The moment someone struggles, they get a label. Too operational, not entrepreneurial enough, stuck in the old way. It sounds like an explanation, but it is usually the friction of a new phase with a name attached.
Ineke Kooistra
To see that difference before it hardens into a verdict, the paper offers a simple diagnostic it calls FIT. Three questions a leader asks before judging a person. What has really changed in the work. Which phase is this person at their best in, and when did you last see it. And the most important one, separate capability from fit.
Because underperformance and a wrong season call for opposite responses. One needs feedback and a plan, the other a different role or an honest goodbye. Confuse the two, and you solve the wrong problem.
From there follows a firm position. Kooistra argues for abolishing the annual performance review as an instrument.
“By the time you sit down for it, the moment to act has usually passed. A change of season announces itself quietly, months in advance. You only hear it if you sit down more often, not once a year.”
The Seasonal Team is available free of charge in Dutch, English and German at intermanage.nl.
Ineke Kooistra knows what it takes to lead a company through every season of growth. As Group CEO she built YoungCapital over more than ten years from a start-up into a European market leader in work for young talent, and went on to scale Circle8 Group into an international IT staffing group of over €1.3 billion. Across more than 25 years she has led organisations through growth, transition and transformation. Today she works as an interim-CEO, strategic advisor and executive search partner. Through InterManage she stands alongside founders, CEOs and PE portfolio companies, and with ELiN Partners her team looks for who someone is when things get hard, not only for what they have done. Her guiding principle: Calm at the top. Momentum in the business.
For interviews, imagery or background, Ineke Kooistra can be reached at ineke@intermanage.nl or +31 6 22 78 40 11.