I think it would have been absolutely naïve—as well as dangerous—if I had come into a company as complex as IBM with a plan to import a band of outsiders somehow magically to run the place better than the people who were there in the first place. I’ve entered other companies from the outside, and based on my experience, you might be able to pull that off at a small company in a relatively simple industry and under optimal conditions.

The second drawback to entering a new leadership position as an insider is that you typically have less “permission” to shake things up. When an insider is appointed to a new leadership position, the organization may not have the expectation that a new direction is called for. This is precisely why an insider was appointed in the first place, presumably. But change always accompanies a new leadership appointment, regardless of where the new leader is coming from. The challenge for insiders is that they may find themselves forced to behave in ways that run counter to what they’ve grown up believing - and what their colleagues expect of them.

His advice to leaders coming into new positions from the inside: “I would take the opportunity to make yourself an outsider. Having an outside facilitator can help with this - he or she can bring in a third-party perspective and independent facts or research that might be different from what you have at the top of your mind or readily at hand.

Let’s face it, no one, regardless of how experienced or talented, is equally adept at every aspect of a job. In any case, as Immelt points out, even if you are above average across the board, no leader has the time to concentrate on every aspect of the job, especially in the earliest days of a new position. Think about where your personal involvement will yield the most leverage and where someone else might do an even better job.

Even though our basic assumptions often remain hidden from our conscious awareness, they nevertheless determine how we manage our careers. Too often we fail to question them, even if they are obsolete or wrong. Precisely because they are taken for granted, basic assumptions are very hard to change. When they remain implicit, we only make incremental change. We only move from one situation into another that is superficially different. The organization or even the industry and sector may change and the coworkers may be different, but in the end, we fall back into similar roles and relationships, reproducing the same work and life structure we had before. Why? Because our working identity has remained the same.