Reshaping Leadership After a Founder’s Retirement

Consider this:

What’s striking about this transition is that it wasn’t driven by a desire to "change for change’s sake." It was driven by a very practical and common occurrence, leadership succession.

When Liz Harr, Managing Partner at Hinge, and her colleagues were faced with the retirement of co-founder Lee Frederiksen, they were not simply losing a founder; they were losing a central source of expertise, judgment, and intellectual leadership. For an entrepreneurial marketing and branding agency whose value rests heavily on the thinking of its people, this wasn’t a role that could simply be backfilled. It required reshaping of leadership, ownership, and performance tracking.

As Liz shared on the Land and Lead podcast, the challenge was about solving for capacity:

"A big thing we had to grapple with is the type of advisory that Hinge provides is very brain intensive…when [Lee] retired as a managing partner and we stepped in, that left a big brain gap and we had to figure out how to relieve some time from us, the managing partners who were already doing, giving that brain power to our clients, but we were also heavily involved in other things."

Across our conversation, Liz described how they approached the challenge of capacity as not as a single decision, but as a set of interrelated design moves; reshaping leadership roles, redistributing authority, and reframing how they tracked performance.

They started at the top.

Hinge has a relatively flat organizational structure because they intentionally hire experienced, senior professionals. Liz and her colleagues decided to leverage this expertise in the design of their new leadership team by creating five managing partner roles, each responsible for separate areas.

As Liz shared:

"We've been very disciplined around as a group of five, to have our lanes…where we directly contribute to Hinge’s success….I think a lot of times managing partners or someone in a similar role gets tasked with doing everything. And that can be very overwhelming. The way we've structured it since coming in a couple of years ago has really allowed us to be effective where we are very talented."

They responded to the transition by clarifying who is responsible for what and, just as importantly, who is not responsible for what. The leadership team itself became more intentionally defined.

But this redefinition of leadership did not stop at the partner level.

Because the core problem they were trying to solve was capacity, it naturally pushed them to look beyond the formal leadership tier. If the partners were to create more time and brain space, someone else had to step into greater ownership.

As Liz explained:

"The need to create time forced us to figure out, how do we empower other team members who aren't at the partner level, but who very much have the talent, the knowledge, and the power to lead. Let's empower them to do that. Take on these tasks. We don't have to do everything."

Empowering team members became an unlock for the managing partners; without distributing leadership more broadly, they would have remained trapped in operational gravity and unable to lead the firm through its next chapter.

With a structure designed for greater capacity, Liz and her colleagues looked to how they tracked performance, Liz described a shift from a short-term toward a more balanced long-term view:

"We were tightly focused on the short term. Even our employee incentive program was based on month-to-month performance metrics. So, we overhauled that. Everything we do, of course, we don't take our eyes off the short term, but we are continually reporting on the long term."

This reframing mattered because it changed not just what leaders focused on, but how people across the organization understood success, progress, and contribution.

Finally, to tie these changes together, Liz and the partner team translated design into shared meaning through three deliberate steps:

• Communicated the mission and illustrated how it fit within decision making

• Held micro-level team discussions to help people align their roles and goals to new behaviors and metrics

• Shifted KPI reporting from week-to-week to month-to-month

Together, these moves connected the structural changes at the top to the lived experience of people throughout the organization.

What’s striking about this transition is that it wasn’t driven by a desire to "change for change’s sake." It was driven by a very practical and common occurrence, leadership succession. Identifying the opportunity and need to change, Liz and her colleagues built a more distributed, intentional, and aligned organization; one capable not only of surviving a founder’s retirement, but of continuing to learn, lead, and evolve beyond it.

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