Ms. Whelan brings something else. She may not have the experience of running a ballet company — few women do — but she has star power. (Mr. Stafford, solid and serious, can’t match her in charisma, and it’s best that he doesn’t try.) She certainly faces a steep learning curve. Until recently, she hasn’t done a great deal of teaching, coaching dancers or staging ballets.

Hopefully, she’s ready for those challenges and will be given ample chance to prove herself, to make mistakes and, most important, to become more than the public face of the company.

Neither Ms. Whelan nor Mr. Stafford is a choreographer, and that’s good: The last thing City Ballet needs is a return to the gloomy period of the 1990s when Mr. Martins was churning out one mediocre ballet after another. But what will their day-to-day duties be? It seems that Mr. Stafford will have the authority: running the company and the school and deciding who dances what. But some of City Ballet’s recent casting choices have been questionable; it has felt, uncomfortably at times, like friends casting friends instead of the best dancer for the part.

As associate artistic director, Ms. Whelan will focus on programming and commissioning works by choreographers, composers and other artists, as well as coaching and teaching. After leaving the company, she began to explore contemporary dance and to work with choreographers outside of the ballet world, including Kyle Abraham. Her taste is something I continue to wonder about — for her program of duets, “Restless Creature,” she seemed drawn to choreography based on how movement would feel on her body more than the resulting dance.

In her new position, she must be able to see the big picture. But there is reason for hope: Her recent project is a work by Lucinda Childs, the great postmodern choreographer. It’s possible that many City Ballet dancers, especially the younger ones, have never heard of Ms. Childs, who has been choreographing ballets in Europe for years. Ms. Whelan’s new job is an opportunity to impart, along with technique and musicality, some dance history beyond ballet, to be a bridge between the worlds of contemporary, or downtown dance, and its more classical uptown counterpart.