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New leader, dismantled systems, sidelined you. The survival sequence.

The situation, which I watched play out roughly thirty times from the HR seat: a new leader arrives, starts unpicking systems you spent years building, sidelines you in meetings, brings in their own people. The question everyone in it asks: do I fight for what I built, or start looking?

Neither, yet. There's a protocol, and it starts with getting the frame right.

The frame

None of this is about you. The new leader never met the you who built those systems; they inherited furniture, and new leaders rearrange furniture. Some of it is genuine improvement, some is territory-marking, and from your position the ratio doesn't matter, because the response protocol is identical. What matters is the one move that reliably ends careers here: defending the furniture.

Every "actually, the reason we built it that way..." files you further under previous regime. I have heard new directors say the words out loud: "he's still defending the old way." In that building, that sentence is an obituary. The furniture-defenders across my thirty viewings were, almost without exception, sidelined or gone within eighteen months, and always baffled, because every individual thing they'd said had been factually correct. Factually correct and politically fatal is a real combination. Respect it.

Step one: the curiosity meeting

Book time in the leader's first ninety days, and arrive with questions, not history: What are you trying to build? What does success look like in a year? What's most in your way? You will likely be the first inheritor who asked rather than defended, and firsts get remembered. You're also collecting the information every subsequent move needs: their actual goals (the decider map's goal column, day 16, for its most important new entry).

Step two: sell judgement, not history

Your years under the old regime are not a monument to protect; they're intelligence to deploy in service of the new plan. The format: "That system can go. Two dependencies will bite in November when it does; I can handle both." You've agreed with the demolition, demonstrated unique knowledge, and volunteered for the future, in one sentence. The person who knows where the bodies are buried and helps dig the new foundations survives every regime. The person who guards the graveyard doesn't.

Step three: the 90-day test

Full, honest effort on the new terms for ninety days: curiosity meeting done, judgement offered, visible support in meetings, no eye-rolling leaked (it always leaks). Then read the result. If you're back in rooms and being consulted, the regime has re-hired you, and regime transitions are historically excellent moments to rise, because vacancies and reshuffles cluster. If after a genuine ninety days you're still frozen out, you have your answer with a clean conscience, and you leave on your timeline with a warm reference and a true story: "the new leadership wanted their own team; I helped with the transition and moved on." That story interviews perfectly, because it happens everywhere and blames nobody.

Why this compounds

Regime change is not a one-off event; over a career you'll inherit new leadership every few years. The protocol run once builds the reputation that pays every subsequent time: adaptable, low-ego, useful in transitions. People with that reputation get called *into* reorganisations rather than cleared out by them.

Your assignment

Whoever is newest in your leadership chain: can you state what they're trying to build, in one sentence? If not, that's the curiosity meeting, booked today, whatever your regime's current weather.

Talk soon, Yasar

P.S. Mid regime-change right now? Reply with where it stands. Enough readers are that a follow-up edition is likely.