THE BOTTOM LINEFood and beverage companies are seeing an unusual wave of executive turnover, and most new leaders arrive with a mandate to change something fast. The new leader owns the plan. The team owns the system the plan will change. The first six months decide whether the people who built today’s operation come to own the new direction, or spend the next year defending the old one.
In about two months this summer, Tyson, Conagra, Hormel, Heineken, Ajinomoto, BellRing, and Ocean Spray all named new chief executives. The changes rarely stop at the top. New CEOs rebuild their teams, new heads of R&D, Engineering, and Innovation follow, and each arrives with a mandate to move faster, cut deeper, or refocus the portfolio. In change leadership consulting work with technical organizations, one question decides whether those mandates succeed: who owns the change?
The odds are not in the new leader’s favor. McKinsey found that two years after an executive transition, 27 to 46 percent are regarded as failures or disappointments, and 68 percent of transitions run into trouble over politics, culture, and people. Most of those breakdowns happen in the space between the leader’s plan and the people expected to carry it out.
The Leader Owns the Plan. The Team Owns Everything Else.
People come to feel that something is theirs when they have shaped it, know it inside out, and put years of themselves into it. Researchers call this psychological ownership, and it has little to do with job titles or org charts. A plant engineer who commissioned a line feels it. So does a scientist who spent four years perfecting a formulation, or a program lead who carried a platform through every stage gate. That ownership is a large part of why they are good at their jobs.
A new executive arrives owning none of it. What the new executive does own, often within weeks, is the plan. They built it, tested it, and defended it to the board, and they are attached to it for the same reasons. The first months of a transition put two groups in the same room, each attached to something different.
Each side is attached to something different, and each sees the other’s attachment as the obstacle.
Why Good Teams Push Back
Ownership turns people into champions of change when they help start it, when it builds on what exists, and when it adds to what they built. It turns them into defenders when change is handed to them, moves fast, and takes away something they built. Organizational research has documented this pattern since the 1990s. Experiments by Baer and Brown confirmed it: people readily accept suggestions that add to their work and reject suggestions that shrink it.
Now consider the typical new leader mandate. It comes from outside the team, it moves fast, and it is usually framed around what gets consolidated, retired, or cut. It checks every box for pushback.
R&D organizations feel this most. Katz and Allen’s study of 50 R&D project groups found that performance declined after about five years of stable membership as teams grew insular. The long-tenured teams a new leader most needs are the ones where ownership runs deepest.
The typical new leader mandate checks every box for pushback. It comes from outside, it moves fast, and it takes something away.
The Signals Worth Reading Differently
Pushback from committed people is easy to misread. Three signals deserve a second look in the first six months.
The first is where the pushback comes from. When the hardest questions come from the longest-tenured scientists and engineers, the mandate has most likely landed on something they built.
The second is the phrase “we tried that in 2022.” Heard as resistance, it ends the conversation. Heard as experience, it starts the conversation the new leader most needs.
The third is a request to help design the change instead of simply adopting it. That request is the team trying to turn a change that takes something away into one that builds on what they know.
The last signal belongs to the new leader. The same research applies to executives, and by the second month the plan is theirs. Watch for the moment a suggestion that would narrow the plan gets treated as obstruction, while one that expands it gets treated as alignment.
By the second month, the plan belongs to the new executive, and it gets defended like it.
Why the First Six Months Matter
Ownership of a new direction forms early or not at all. A study of 5,676 films by Berg and Yu found that people handed a finished idea to execute produced weaker results than people who helped shape it, and the gap traced back to ownership. A strategy fully formed puts every team below the leader in that position.
This creates a real tension. McKinsey found that 67 percent of leaders in transition wish they had moved faster to change the culture. Speed matters, and so does whether the team has helped shape what the speed is carrying. The stakes are concrete. Direct transition expenses for senior roles have been estimated at 213 percent of annual salary, and McKinsey notes the larger cost is losing six, 12, or 18 months while competitors race ahead.
In change leadership consulting work with R&D, Engineering, and Manufacturing leaders, three risks consistently separate intended results from actual ones: handoffs that kill progress, solutions developed without accounting for behavior change, and speed that outruns the team’s capacity and capability. All three share a root cause. Each has shut the people closest to the work out of shaping what comes next.
The question worth asking in the first six months is whether the people who built today’s operation can see their fingerprints anywhere on the next one.
For executives within three to six months of stepping into a role with a change mandate, or of welcoming a new leader who carries one, this is the window when ownership of the new direction is still being decided. The leaders who navigate it best rarely do it alone. An experienced guide who understands industry complexity and can shape solutions for the specific culture is often what separates results that stick from results that stall. It is an ideal time to compare notes on how the strategy will be operationalized, before the organization settles on its own answer.
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Charlotte Allen is the Founder and CEO of Rebel Success for Leaders, a boutique change leadership consulting firm partnering with Fortune 500 and mid-market food and beverage organizations. We help leaders build the change leadership capability that makes critical initiatives stick, so teams adopt them and they are still in play 6 to 12 months after implementation.
