John Kahl's predecessor as chief executive officer of Manco Inc. is a legend.

He bought the Cleveland company in 1971, when it was a modest supplier of adhesive products to industrial customers and had annual sales of $800,000. He moved it into the retail market, where it grew to $180 million in annual sales by the time it was acquired by Henkel Group, a German conglomerate, in 1998. And, Mr. Kahl says, the company's profitability has been "consistent" with the sales growth.

Beyond that, he says, the former CEO's forceful personality and share-the-wealth style earned him fierce loyalty from customers and employees alike.

So, Mr. Kahl had gigantic shoes to fill when his father, Jack, retired last year. "Father was dynamic, entrepreneurial and driven," he says. "We called him a monomaniac on a mission."

How do you replace such an icon?

Very carefully.

Jeffrey Immelt is likely to learn that as he takes on the task of replacing Jack Welch at the top of General Electric Co. Rarely has any CEO garnered the reverential and universal acclaim heaped on Mr. Welch, who built GE into the role model for modern corporations. How do you follow that act? "You have to have charisma," says executive recruiter Jeffrey Christian, CEO of Cleveland's Christian & Timbers. "You have to be someone that people want to follow."

Still, says fellow executive recruiter Dale Winston, chairwoman and CEO of Battalia Winston International, the challenge is enormous. "You're almost better off succeeding the successor," she says.

Sports fans know that syndrome. Do you remember who succeeded John Wooden as coach of the UCLA college basketball dynasty in the 1970s? Who followed the legendary Vince Lombardi as coach of the Green Bay Packers, the dominant professional football team of the 1960s?

The answers are Gene Bartow and Phil Bengtson, respectively, and neither of them enjoyed a particularly comfortable or lengthy tenure trying to live up to the lofty expectations created by their predecessors.

It's much easier to take over an operation that's in the dumps than one that's riding high, particularly when you're supplanting a charismatic or beloved leader. In the former, everyone knows that changes must be made. In the latter, the reigning sentiment is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Whatever you do will be compared with your predecessor -- would Jack (or Jill, for that matter) have done it that way? And any slippage in performance will be seen as proof of your inferiority.

But you can't be too timid, either. Times change, bringing on new demands. In his waning days as CEO of Hewlett-Packard in 1999, Lewis Platt told me that his biggest regret was not being more "rebellious" and questioning some of the conservative traditions that the men who gave the company its name wanted him to preserve. He felt constrained by his predecessors' aversion to debt and layoffs. When changing industry conditions cut into H-P's dominance, the much-criticized Mr. Platt opted for early retirement.

Besides, nobody's perfect, not even the iconic Mr. Welch. So the challenge is to win hearts and minds without demeaning the legacy of the legend.

Mr. Kahl says he has tried to temper any change with a sense of reverence for the past, blending old and new in a way that won't unsettle company veterans. "We can make things better, but we're not going to throw out the baby with the bath water," he says.

Mr. Kahl points to the advisory board of outside experts his father created as an example. "It would have been crazy for me to kill the advisers," he says. But he did feel it needed to be changed. "We kept the core and brought in new people. Now it's a nice mix of Manco past and Manco future," he says.

Initially, it's important to reassure everyone that the important issues -- the company's values and its culture -- will remain unchanged. Mr. Kahl emphasized that he had worked side-by-side with his father for 16 years and that their business styles were similar. In that, he felt he had an advantage over someone arriving from the outside to replace a legendary leader. While an outsider doesn't have any corporate baggage or history to deal with, which can be an advantage, he also doesn't have the knowledge of the company's cultural norms as a guiding conscience when making change. "No CEO wants to be labeled as 'more of the same,' but when it comes to the culture, it is more of the same," he says. "We have the same values as the day he left."

The elder Mr. Kahl, a devout follower of Wal-Mart legend Sam Walton's management philosophies, believed in involving employees and sharing the company's wealth with them. "Father was very big on inclusion," he says. "Not only for me and my brother (Bill, another company executive), but for an extended portion of our management team."

While it's common, for example, for one or two representatives from Wal-Mart suppliers to attend the retailing giant's annual meeting, Manco traditionally sent more than 20 executives and managers. Mr. Kahl saw the event as a management seminar for his team. While it's a costly tradition in this economy, his son has continued that practice. "It's an exposure situation to grow those people," he says.

It's also important for the new leader to quickly communicate his expectations to the troops, to ease their anxieties over the transition. Mr. Kahl has done this in a variety of ways.

For one, he has used the weekly, two-hour meetings his father conducted with the company's middle managers as a forum to convey his expectations for the organization, how he was similar to his father, how he wasn't, what would change and what wouldn't.

Among the changes he outlined were the installation of management tools to measure employee performance "so we can appropriately reward those who really impact the business and encourage those who don't," he says.

That was something his father never did. "He always drove us with better ideas for the business, but managing the details wasn't his forte," he says.

Major changes must be discussed and explained. When, for example, the company was forced to increase employees' co-payments to medical providers, the changes were outlined in employee forums. "Many companies would just put that out in an e-mail," he says. "We showed the folks we weren't trying to make them pay more of the bill, that we were just staying static with cost increases."

This way, he adds, "you can avoid a lot of the negativity around the water cooler" about changes.

Mr. Kahl says his biggest fear was that he wouldn't be able to "fill Dad's shoes" in terms of his relationships with customers and employees, especially the management team. He set out to strengthen his relationships by making himself highly visible at the company and in the community. "I've spent a lot of time with suppliers," he says. "Imagine how nervous they are. Is the relationship going to change? I spent a lot of time telling them we value what they do."

It's also critical that the new leader spend considerable time reassuring employees that their contributions are valued. "You have to listen to your people, where they think the company is going," says Mr. Christian, the executive-search specialist. "You can't be an iron fist." He adds: "You have to get everyone to feel their contribution is important to the company and its vision."

Mr. Christian says you also have to ask the right questions. What do customers and employees like or don't like about what you're doing? What are the things you have to stop doing, what do you need to focus on? Have fiefdoms been created within the company, are there some bad eggs that have to be sorted out? Who are the drivers at the company?

Mr. Kahl actually started preparing for this day three years ago, when he was chief operating officer, and instituted quarterly meetings with groups of employees sans supervisors. The meetings were designed not for him to speak, but to listen to their "unfiltered" views on the company and where it was going, he says.

More recently, he has done a lot of "management by walking around" -- visiting departments to hear what they have on their minds.

"You just have to be honest," he advises. "Get to know your people, ask for their input and advice. Don't claim to know everything."