The best leaders practice stewardship before they pursue change

Why New Leaders Feel Pressure to Change Things

Leadership transitions tend to follow a familiar pattern. When a new chief executive steps in, talk quickly turns to the reorganisation that must be just around the corner.

A new head of sales arrives, and suddenly everyone is discussing territories, targets and incentives. Bring in a new CMO, and it is only a matter of time before someone wonders aloud if the brand could do with a refresh.

We rarely pause to question the assumption behind all this. New leaders are expected to change things — sometimes, it seems, simply for the sake of being seen to do so. Visible action is often taken as proof of progress, while continuity is sometimes mistaken for a lack of ambition. Whether we realise it or not, organisations tend to reward intervention. We applaud those who leave their mark.

“Leadership is not ownership.
It is temporary custodianship”

Isabelle Duarté

The Difference Between Ownership and Custodianship

I found myself reflecting on this recently while listening to an episode of the Soldo CFO Playbook podcast featuring Andy Mullineaux, CFO of Moke International. During the conversation, he described himself as a custodian of the Moke brand. It was not a dramatic statement, nor was it presented as some grand leadership principle. Yet there was something about that particular choice of words that I could genuinely relate to.

Custodian.

It is not a word you hear much in business circles. We are far more comfortable talking about ownership than stewardship. Transformation, disruption and reinvention are the order of the day. Leaders are encouraged to challenge assumptions, overturn conventions and drive change. In that context, custodianship can sound almost quaint.

A custodian does not inherit something and immediately ask how it can be remade in their own image. Nor do they assume that their value lies in the scale of the changes they introduce. Their first responsibility is to understand what has been entrusted to them. Only then can they begin to understand what should change, what should remain and what deserves to be strengthened.

During my career, I have seen more than a few organisations embark on significant change programmes because a new leader wanted to signal a new direction. Occasionally, those initiatives transformed the business. Sometimes they were exactly what was required. More often, however, I was left wondering whether the changes had been driven by genuine necessity or by a very human desire to demonstrate progress, establish ownership and leave behind a visible legacy.

There is nothing wrong with that impulse, as such. Most of us want to feel we have made a meaningful contribution. The trouble is, what is meaningful and what is necessary are not always the same.

What Brand Stewardship Taught Me at Soldo

When I joined Soldo, I inherited a brand that had already been through several stages of development. Like many growing companies, it possessed a mixture of strengths, inconsistencies and unresolved tensions. Before long, I found myself hearing a wide range of opinions about what was working and what was not. Some people felt the brand no longer reflected the business we had become. Others questioned whether parts of the identity were sufficiently distinctive. There were discussions about positioning, messaging and visual expression, often held with considerable passion and entirely good intentions.

As so often happens, much of the discussion eventually circled back to the logo.

I remember thinking this was understandable, but also a little misleading. Logos have a curious way of becoming the lightning rod for all sorts of organisational frustrations. If the brand feels unclear, blame the logo. If communication is inconsistent, blame the logo. If the business has changed, blame the logo. The poor logo ends up as the visible symbol of concerns that may have nothing to do with it at all.

If I had arrived determined to make my mark straight away, I could easily have taken those conversations as a green light for change. There was certainly enough evidence to build a case. Yet something about it all felt unfinished. The more I listened, the less convinced I became that the visual identity was really at the heart of people’s concerns.

Choosing to slow down

Rather than jumping into solutions, I chose to spend some time understanding the problem first.

That may sound less remarkable than it ought to. In reality, holding back judgment can feel surprisingly awkward. Organisations are never short of opinions, and leaders are expected to have answers at the ready. Taking time to observe is sometimes mistaken for indecision. Listening is sometimes mistaken for not knowing what to do.

Even so, I spent my first months talking to colleagues, listening to customers and trying to understand how the brand was experienced by the people who dealt with it every day. What came out of those conversations was quite revealing.

The elements of the brand that generated the greatest uncertainty internally were often the very things customers recognised most readily. The logo, in particular, seemed to enjoy a level of familiarity and distinctiveness that many people inside the business had underestimated. Customers remembered it. They associated it with us. More importantly, they seemed to like it.

Gradually, I started to suspect we were trying to solve a narrative problem with visual tools. The issue was not a lack of visual assets. The visual identity was there. The logo was there. The colours were there. The design system was there. What we lacked was something more basic: a clear and widely shared sense of who we were as a business, what we stood for and why we mattered.

Looking back, I think we built a visual language before we had really developed the story that gave it meaning.

Once I saw that, the way forward became much clearer. Instead of starting with the identity, we focused on the story. We spent time defining what the company stood for, spelling out what made us distinctive and building a shared understanding that employees could get behind and customers could recognise. Only when that work was underway did it make sense to think about how the visual identity should support the story.

Further Reading: Stewardship in Practice

Many of the reflections in this article were shaped by my experience leading the Soldo brand through a period of growth and change. If you’re interested in how stewardship, performance and long-term brand building intersect in practice, I recently shared some of those lessons in an interview with Financial Promoter.
→ Read: FP Voices: Isabelle Duarté on Balancing Brand Building, Performance & AI

Why Restraint Is a Leadership Strength

What strikes me now is that the most important decision I made then was not really about branding at all. It was the decision to hold back from acting until I understood the problem.

The older I get, the more I suspect that many leadership mistakes start where curiosity stops. We see something that looks obvious, pick a solution that feels reasonable and move quickly. Action creates momentum; momentum creates visibility; visibility gives the comforting sense that progress is being made. The trouble is, organisations are rarely as simple as they seem. What looks like a branding problem may actually be a storytelling problem.

This is why the idea of custodianship resonates so strongly with me. The longer I spend in leadership roles, the more I find myself thinking of leadership not as ownership, but as temporary custodianship.

A custodian knows the difference between temporary responsibility and permanent ownership. They see that what they inherit has been shaped by many hands before them and will keep evolving long after they have moved on. Their job is not to impose themselves, but to strengthen what is valuable, improve what needs it and preserve what makes it distinctive in the first place.

Seen this way, leadership starts to feel rather different. The question is no longer what mark we want to leave, but what deserves to last.

That does not mean resisting change. I, for one, often find change exhilarating. Good custodians know that standing still can be just as risky as changing for its own sake. Markets move, customer expectations shift, and businesses have to adapt. The real challenge is knowing when change is needed and when restraint is the wiser choice.

Perhaps that is the lesson I took from Andy’s comment. In a business world that tends to reward speed, certainty and visible action, restraint can seem oddly out of place. In fact, I think it is often both wise and brave. It shows the discipline to understand before acting, and the humility to accept that not every contribution needs to be seen.

Further Reading: Custodianship and the Long Term

A custodian understands that their responsibility is temporary, but the consequences of their decisions are not.
For readers interested in the connection between stewardship and long-term value creation, this article from FCLTGlobal explores the behaviours and mindsets that help organisations thrive beyond the next reporting cycle.
→ Read: Corporate Long-Term Behaviors

A custodian’s job is not to leave fingerprints on everything. It is to leave things better than they found them.

Perhaps that is the essence of leadership stewardship: understanding what deserves to endure, improving what genuinely needs to change and having the discipline to know the difference.