The Toronto Maple Leafs have high hopes for their new coach, but in the business world, bringing in an outsider in a leadership transition is rarely simple, says expert
The Toronto Maple Leafs made it official on June 17, 2026, naming Jim Hiller as the 41st head coach in franchise history. For hockey fans, it is the latest chapter in a long and turbulent story for the franchisee. For human resources (HR) leaders, it’s something else: a leadership transition case study in what happens when an organization under public pressure reaches for an external hire to reset its culture and direction.
The question HR leaders might not get asked – but should be – is not whether a new leader can fix a broken organization. The key is whether the organization has done the work to give that leader any realistic chance of succeeding, according to Cissy Pau, Principal Consultant at Clear HR Consulting in Vancouver.
Pau has spent years helping Canadian organizations navigate exactly these moments, and she says the external hire decision is rarely as straightforward as it looks from the outside.
“If they've set a vision for the business and the leadership team that's in place, and that leadership team hasn't been able to achieve that vision, then the question becomes, was it the leadership team, the leader, or they just weren't the right fit?” she says. “If so maybe an outside fresh perspective will help.”
Pau also believes that if an organization is dysfunctional and employees know that, more people may be supportive of change at the top from an external source. But a fresh start, she cautions, isn’t the same as a clean slate.
The case for – and against – external leadership hires
When an organization has struggled internally and even publicly, and internal candidates are seen as part of the problem, boards and ownership groups often feel the weight of expectation pushing them toward someone untouched by the existing culture. There’s logic to it: a leader who selected a management team that underperformed may have created a group that thinks along the same lines, making internal succession a riskier bet than it appears, says Pau. But she points out that the external hire also carries a real cost, one that doesn’t always show up in press releases.
“If you bring in an outside party, what impact does that have internally?” she says. “Would that be a motivating move or would that be a demoralizing move? Every company is going to be different.”
For HR leaders guiding boards through these decisions, understanding how to manage change in your organization is foundational, and the arrival of a new external leader is, at its core, a change management exercise, according to Pau.
Change management mistakes new leaders keep making
The single most common error Pau sees when a new executive arrives – whether a coach, a chief executive, or a divisional head – is the impulse to move fast and signal authority through sweeping change.
“Sometimes what we've seen is that a new leader coming in wants to clean house right away and they're like, ‘All right, this is what I think and I'm going to make these changes and do a wholesale cleanup of the organization,’” she says. “And I think sometimes that strategy backfires because you don't necessarily understand that it's a change management exercise but you haven't gotten the people onside.”
The workforce doesn’t leave when the old leader does, says Pau, and the employees who remain are the ones who will carry or sabotage any new direction – and they’re watching closely.
Her advice to incoming leaders is deliberate and people-first: resist the urge to announce and start by listening. Survey employees. Ask what has worked, what hasn’t, and where the organization went off track. Resist the board's version of events as the only version, she says. “That's one group's perspective that might not be the same perspective as the staff's,” says Pau.
This dynamic matters especially in high-profile situations where a board has built a strong narrative around what went wrong. A new leader who arrives with that narrative already fixed in mind – and acts on it immediately – risks compounding the very dysfunction they were hired to fix, adds Pau.
What to preserve, what to dismantle
The diagnostic phase that most leaders skip is precisely the one that determines whether change sticks, but Pau believes transformation shouldn’t be a solo exercise and not everything broken needs to be replaced. “Maybe the organization is 75 per cent of the way there and they just need to tweak one thing that was dragging the organization down,” she says.
Pau also raises a measurement problem that HR professionals will recognize immediately: when everything is changed at once, it becomes impossible to know what actually worked. “It requires some thoughtful analysis because if you just go in and say, ‘This is what we're going to do, we're going to completely overhaul operations,’ it's going to be very hard for the organization to know which lever that was pulled was successful and which wasn't,” she says. “If you change everything, how will you be able to measure which was the thing that led to the most success?”
This is where HR leaders can deepen their influence and drive organizational change most meaningfully – not by executing the new leader's mandate uncritically, but by ensuring there is a structured evaluation before major decisions are made about people and processes, says Pau.
“If it's the very top person, they need to rally the troops, bring people along with them to make sure that people understand what's happening, what their place is in the picture, and that maybe there's going to be some changes and these are the steps I'm going to take to evaluate before I make changes,” she says. “If it's not the person at the very top and it's a bit lower down, I think there’s more of a place for the organization to do some change management and communication prior to that person coming in, reset the organization and say, ‘This is our strategy going forward.’”
The human cost no one is counting
The piece of high-profile leadership transitions that gets the least attention – in sports and in business – is the one that is hardest to quantify: morale.
Research from PwC's 2025 Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey, which interviewed nearly 50,000 workers globally, found that employees with the highest levels of trust in top management are 63 per cent more motivated than those who trust senior leaders the least, but only half of employees trust top management. In organizations where that trust has already been eroded by dysfunction or controversy, a new leader is inheriting a deficit that won’t disappear simply because the letterhead has changed.
“The impact of poor morale on productivity, efficiency, and the bottom line – if you don't take that human element into consideration, the changes might not be as effective or successful as you want them to be,” says Pau.
She also points to a risk that rarely makes it into turnaround plans: the alliances formed around the departing leader. When a well-regarded leader is removed, those who were loyal to them don’t simply reset. Some disengage, some leave, and some may actively work against the new direction – whether by quietly undermining the incoming executive internally, or by shaping the narrative externally through their professional networks, says Pau.
"Those are the things that aren't always taken into consideration, because the decision makers see it from their perspective,” she says. “They don't necessarily see it from the employee's perspective.”
For HR leaders advising boards on external hires – whether in professional sports or the business world – the practical lesson is that the external hire isn’t the solution, it’s the starting condition, says Pau. The solution is the change management work that surrounds it.
The Toronto Maple Leafs, like any organization in disarray, are counting on their new hire to be at the centre of that change.
