The Other Chair

In May 2019, something unusual happened at a British retailer that sells televisions and sound systems. Its founder, Julian Richer, transferred control of the business to an employee ownership trust by selling it 60% of his shares. People who had helped build Richer Sounds acquired an indirect stake in its future. The company’s own account records the change plainly. A percentage moved. A familiar workplace acquired a different shape.

Richer also made a separate payment of £1,000 for every year each employee had worked there, according to his own account. That detail stays with me. A year spent helping customers, learning equipment, and returning to the same workplace had been counted. Service had become something visible on a piece of paper.

I cannot know what every employee felt. Some might have welcomed the change with excitement; others might have wanted to understand the practical details first. What interests me is the question the announcement opens: when a workplace changes hands, or changes the way it is led, how do the people already inside find their place in what comes next?

Imagine a different workplace. This is an imagined scene, with no particular company or person behind it. Two colleagues have spent years carrying different responsibilities. One knows which customer will forgive a late delivery. The other knows which promise the company cannot afford to make. Their knowledge overlaps, but it is not interchangeable. Between them sits a history of disagreements, favors, small mistakes corrected before anyone outside noticed.

Now the organization changes. A new arrangement looks cleaner. Responsibilities will be brought together. Someone will have the final word.

For the person receiving more responsibility, the change may feel like recognition. For the colleague beside them, the same decision can raise a quieter question: where does my judgment go now?

The announcement can be perfectly courteous. The farewell speech can be sincere. The difficulty may arrive later, in an ordinary moment: a meeting invitation that no longer comes, a familiar problem discussed without a familiar voice, a question that once reached your desk and now travels somewhere else. None of this needs a villain. People can care about one another and still struggle over who gets to decide.

This is why the word structure feels too small for the lives it contains. A chart shows lines and boxes. It cannot show how long someone needed to become confident enough to speak, or what it costs to discover that speaking no longer carries the same weight. When responsibilities move, years of belonging move with them.

Access to authority is already uneven. In its review of the world of work, the International Labour Organization reports that women accounted for 40.1% of global employment in 2025, while holding 30.5% of managerial positions. Those figures describe who is represented across a vast working population. They leave us with a human question about the distance between contributing to an organization and having influence over its direction.

The numbers cannot tell us how any one meeting unfolded. They can remind us to look around the table. Who has learned the work without receiving the title? Who is asked to explain, and who is trusted to judge? Whose experience becomes the reason for a promotion, and whose experience becomes something others expect to keep drawing on after their authority has gone?

I keep returning to the less visible person in these moments. Public stories of organizational change naturally follow the new leader. A photograph is taken. A biography is published. Someone describes the next chapter. The colleague whose place has narrowed may still arrive the next morning, greet the same people, and do useful work. Their story has no clear ending, which makes it easier to overlook.

Keeping that person in view does not mean every position must remain forever. Organizations need room to change. People grow into new responsibilities, and sometimes a different person can carry a difficult task better. But there is a kind of care in acknowledging what a decision asks another person to relinquish. Responsibility can be reassigned in a sentence. Recognition takes a longer conversation.

The Richer Sounds announcement offers one reason to pay attention: a change in a business can explicitly recognize the people who carried it this far. It also leaves the wider question alive. How should years of contribution matter when tomorrow’s authority is being decided? Ownership, leadership, and being heard are connected parts of working life, and each deserves attention on its own terms.

That is the concern behind my interest in how organizations change. I want to understand the human arrangements hidden inside tidy announcements: the trust someone carries into a new role, the participation someone fears losing, the possibility of making room without erasing a history.

When I picture a company beginning its next chapter, I try to picture the whole table. The person stepping into the light matters. So does the person looking at the chair beside them, wondering whether there will still be a place to sit.