By Jay Jacobson
What executive movement across death care should make us ask about leadership, culture, and the relationships we say matter.
I remember when changing suppliers in funeral service was a big deal.
I mean a really big deal.
You didn’t discover another company was 3% cheaper on Monday and move thirty years of business by Friday.
There was history involved.
Your casket representative knew you. Your vault company knew your staff. Your preneed representative knew your business. They attended your state convention, sponsored the golf outing, sat at your table during dinner, and sometimes knew your father before you took over the funeral home.
More importantly, when something went wrong, you knew whom to call.
You weren’t calling a corporation.
You were calling Bob. Or Susan. Or Mike — and they answered, which mattered.
Sometimes another company was cheaper. Sometimes a competitor offered better terms or a newer product.
We stayed anyway.
Why?
Loyalty.
In funeral service, relationships have always meant something.
At least we believed they did.
I’ve Been Watching the Names Move
Follow the death-care trade press and you begin noticing the names.
A CEO moves here. A president moves there. An executive leaves one organization and appears at another. Someone moves from consulting into operations. Someone else comes into death care from another industry.
FuneralVision.com has documented significant executive movement and restructuring across death care.
It reported Bob Ekins’ move from Johnson Consulting Group to Newcomer Funeral Service Group. It covered major leadership changes at Park Lawn Corporation. It reported Foundation Partners Group’s appointment of Jim Evanger as CEO and president, bringing decades of leadership experience from outside death care.
FuneralVision.com has also reported another side of the story. Carriage Services’ leadership realignment included internal promotions and expanded responsibilities for existing leaders. Precoa similarly described people growing into new roles as the organization evolved.
So executive movement itself isn’t the issue.
Organizations change. Strategies change. New capabilities are needed. Sometimes an outside leader is exactly what an organization needs.
What concerns me is something I have observed after some leadership transitions.
A new executive arrives, a few months pass, and then another familiar name appears — someone the executive worked with before.
Then another.
Meanwhile, people who have spent years, sometimes decades, inside the organization begin disappearing.
I don’t sit in those boardrooms. I don’t see the performance reviews. I don’t know the circumstances surrounding every departure.
Some of those decisions may be entirely justified.
Someone isn’t performing. Someone refuses to adapt. A position has outgrown the person occupying it. The organization needs capabilities it simply doesn’t have.
Good leadership does not mean keeping everyone forever.
But when replacement becomes a pattern, we should be willing to ask a harder question.
Is this transformation?
Or are we sometimes watching executive laziness wrapped in the language of change?
Developing People Is Hard
I don’t mean lazy in the traditional sense.
These executives may work extraordinary hours.
I’m talking about leadership laziness.
Developing people is hard.
You have to coach, listen, set expectations, have uncomfortable conversations and understand why someone works differently.
Sometimes you have to sit across from an experienced employee who disagrees with you and consider the possibility that they might know something you don’t.
Most importantly, you have to lead people you didn’t choose.
Imagine walking into a new organization, and around the table are people who have been there 10, 20, perhaps 30 years.
They know the customers, they remember previous strategies, and they understand why decisions were made that make little sense to someone who arrived Monday morning.
They possess something you cannot download during orientation: Institutional knowledge.
And some of them will question you.
Wouldn’t it be easier to call someone you’ve worked with before?
Someone who understands your expectations? Someone who speaks your language? Someone whose loyalty you already trust?
Of course it would.
That’s precisely why we should pay attention to it.
A Culture Can Become Quieter without Becoming Healthier
There may also be insecurity underneath some of these decisions.
Secure leaders don’t require agreement to feel confident in their authority.
An experienced employee says:
“We’ve tried that before.”
A secure leader asks:
“Tell me what happened.”
An insecure leader may hear:
“I don’t believe in your leadership.”
Institutional knowledge starts looking like resistance.
Questions feel like challenges, independent judgment looks like disloyalty, and so the circle gets smaller.
People who question disappear. Familiar people arrive, meetings become easier and everyone seems more aligned.
And the executive may believe the culture is improving.
Maybe.
But remember: A culture can become quieter without becoming healthier.
People Are Watching
Employees don’t need a memo explaining what is happening.
They watch respected colleagues disappear, and they notice who replaces them.
And their questions begin to change.
Instead of, “What is best for the organization?” they ask, “What does the boss want to hear?”
Instead of, “Should I challenge this?” they ask, “Is speaking up worth the risk?”
Instead of, “How can I make this better?” they wonder, “Am I next?”
That’s how contribution becomes compliance.
People don’t stop having opinions.
They stop sharing them.
Leadership can look around the table, see everyone nodding, and mistake silence for alignment.
Then Someone You Wanted to Keep Leaves
The cost of turnover is obvious: recruiting, onboarding, training, vacancies, lost productivity, lost relationships and lost institutional knowledge.
But the most expensive departure may not be the employee an executive intentionally removes.
It may be the talented employee who watches what happened and quietly decides to leave six months later.
They don’t make a scene: They return a recruiter’s call, they have lunch, and then one afternoon they say, “I’ve been offered another opportunity.”
Leadership is surprised.
The employee isn’t.
Five intentional replacements become eight departures. Eight become twelve.
Eventually leadership points to the turnover as evidence that transformation was necessary.
Perhaps.
Or perhaps the method of transformation helped create the instability now being used to justify it.
Organizations Can Forget How to Build People
There is another consequence: An organization that continually buys talent can eventually forget how to build it.
Managers watch what leadership models.
Struggling employee?
Replace them.
Leadership gap?
Recruit externally.
Different perspective?
Find someone more aligned.
Eventually coaching weakens, mentoring becomes incidental and internal career paths become harder to see.
Employees begin wondering why they should spend years preparing for the next opportunity if the next opportunity will simply be filled by someone the new executive already knows.
The organization becomes dependent on the external labor market to provide what its leaders have stopped developing.
That’s not a talent strategy. It’s a dependency.
But Employees Aren’t the Only Ones Watching
This is where the issue becomes particularly important in funeral service.
We are watching, too.
For generations, suppliers have asked funeral directors for loyalty.
Stay with us.
Trust the relationship.
Don’t make the decision entirely on price.
Remember who was there when you needed something.
And many funeral homes did exactly that.
We remained loyal because relationships had value beyond the transaction.
So, what happens when a company appears increasingly willing to discard 20-year relationships inside its own organization?
We may not know everything that happened.
But we are still watching.
Eventually a funeral-home owner may reasonably ask: If loyalty doesn’t appear to matter inside your organization, why should loyalty continue to matter in my relationship with your organization?
Loyalty Cannot Simply Be a Sales Strategy
I believe relationships have value, but loyalty is a cultural value before it is a sales strategy.
You cannot continually tell customers that relationships matter while behaving in ways that cause those customers to question whether relationships matter inside your organization.
If relationships become interchangeable inside an organization, customers may eventually begin viewing suppliers as interchangeable, too.
Then what differentiates you?
The funeral home that spent thirty years valuing the relationship begins shopping the transaction.
Think about the irony: You cannot commoditize relationships inside your organization and then ask customers not to commoditize their relationship with you.
This Is Not an Argument Against Change
Executives need the authority to lead.
Sometimes people need to leave.
Leadership without accountability isn’t compassion. Keeping someone indefinitely in a position they cannot perform serves no one.
And recruiting someone you’ve successfully worked with before can be excellent leadership.
The question isn’t whether executives recruit externally.
The question is whether recruiting talent supplements leadership development or substitutes for it.
There is a tremendous difference between:
“This person cannot take us where we need to go.”
and:
“This isn’t one of my people.”
Strong executives know the difference.
Boards should make sure they do.
Measure What Leaders Build
Maybe we need to broaden the executive scorecard.
Revenue matters, margins matter, growth matters … but people matter, too.
Don’t only ask what an executive changed — ask what they built.
Don’t only count the people they recruited. Also count the people they developed.
Don’t only measure who left. Look at who became better because this person led them, and ask questions like:
- Who was promoted?
- Who was coached into greater responsibility?
- Did voluntary turnover rise?
- Do employees still challenge ideas?
- Is institutional knowledge valued?
- Are people who were there before the executive arrived still growing?
- And if senior positions increasingly go to former colleagues, ask why.
It doesn’t prove anything is wrong.
But leadership ought to be able to explain the strategy.
Then ask one question: Does this executive know how to lead people they didn’t personally choose?
That’s the Work
Bringing your own people with you can make leadership easier.
Teaching someone is harder.
Coaching someone is harder.
Winning over a skeptic is harder.
Building trust with someone who remembers three leaders before you is harder.
Listening when an experienced employee tells you something you don’t want to hear is harder.
That’s the work.
Executive strength isn’t demonstrated by how quickly a leader can clear a room and refill the chairs.
It’s demonstrated by what happens to the people sitting in those chairs after the leader arrives.
When nearly everyone who doesn’t fit the new leader’s mold becomes disposable, we shouldn’t automatically call it transformation.
Sometimes it may be transformation.
Sometimes it may be insecurity.
Sometimes it may be impatience.
And sometimes it may simply be the easier path.
We Are Watching
Funeral service has been built around some very old ideas, such as trust, respect, relationships, service, commitment and loyalty.
I still believe those values matter.
But loyalty has to mean more than keeping a customer.
The real measure of an executive isn’t merely the team they can assemble.
It’s the people they can develop, the trust they can earn, the relationships they can preserve while building new ones and the organization they leave behind.
FuneralVision.com’s reporting shows us a death-care leadership landscape that continues to move and evolve. What happens after the announcement deserves our attention, too.
We should pay attention because how an organization changes tells us something about what that organization values.
If you ask funeral homes to remain loyal to your organization, remember:
We aren’t only listening to what you say about relationships.
We’re watching how you practice them.
Jay Jacobson is a licensed funeral director, speaker, consultant, and author whose career has been shaped by decades of service to grieving families, funeral professionals, and communities in need. Through his work in funeral service, leadership development, staffing, and education, he helps others lead with compassion, integrity, and presence. His writing is informed by both professional experience and personal seasons of caregiving and grief, giving his perspective a voice that is practical, humane, and deeply grounded. Jacobson is the author of Lead by Legendary Example and Never Stop Dreaming.
