Succession

 

Leadership transition has obviously been in the news a lot. This month brought endless speculation and strategizing at the highest levels of power. July was also when my firm successfully took a big step in setting in motion a thoughtful and sustainable process for on-ramping, elevating, and off-ramping principals. 

The details of our succession plans are left for private conversations and future announcements. Today I just wanted to muse on this notion of stepping down from leadership, since it is something I have myself done, as well as observed with great interest in the worlds of politics, business, and athletics.

Sports analogies are easy to come by, at least for me, so we'll start there. There is a sense in which a long-time vet, who has poured their heart and soul into the team's success, deserves to be able to go out on their own terms. They may still be among the league's elite. They may still have their A+ fastball. Or even if they've lost a few MPH on that fastball, they can more than make up for it with the craftiness, wisdom, and gamesmanship that comes from the accumulated years of experience. From a performance standpoint (wins and losses) and from a business standpoint (fans in seats, TV revenue), it can be hard to see your meal ticket phase down.

On the other hand, performance at the highest levels is cruelly unforgiving. That few MPH lost on one's fastball can be the difference between elite results and mediocre results. And there are a finite number of spots on a team roster, and a finite number of games in which starters can play, so trotting one person out there every five days can mean fewer opportunities for others. Just as there are a finite number of windows of opportunity for teams to contend for a championship, given how ephemeral it is to retain a core talent base in light of alternatives those individuals may have in a few years.

You can see how hard it is for someone on top to move off the top, and just as hard for an organization to initiate let alone consummate the process of moving them off the top. And yet oftentimes the necessary things are the hard things. And yet oftentimes the hard things get left undone and create worse problems down the road.

There are no easy solutions to the challenge of succession. But they must be identified, explored, and executed. In sports there is a saying that "time is undefeated," meaning that no matter how dominant an athlete is, eventually they will "lose" to the vagaries of getting older. 

In sports, an athlete's prime, even their entire career, is cruelly short. We have longer in business and politics, but it's not forever. Succession is not easy to pull off. There is a reason there is a show called "Succession" on Max that is full of enough drama and intrigue to pull in millions of viewers per show. In the real world, leadership transition can be messy, unpopular, and rancorous. But the option of doing nothing is the worst of all.