In particular, so many technical leaders work in a vacuum with no context. People joining a company as a technical leader needs to absolutely dig in and understand the existing landscape and processes, and not try to just blindly reuse what they did at the last gig.
You are hired to bring in your context and personality and experience. Do not fall in the same traps the org has been in. If they didn't need help and change, you would not have been hired.
All true. If you go in blindly without understanding where they actually are (and how they got there), then you are sure to muck things up pretty badly.
In some cases, you were only hired because the previous person "was doing a bad job" and they need someone "to do a good job" but in reality, the previous person wasn't even able to make any decisions, and was in fact just being strung along with the top-down direction, leading to bad results, and that person got fed up and left.
In particular, so many technical leaders work in a vacuum with no context. People joining a company as a technical leader needs to absolutely dig in and understand the existing landscape and processes, and not try to just blindly reuse what they did at the last gig.