Senior leaders often avoid grooming successors because it means facing their own replaceability. Effective succession requires proactive identification of potential replacements and deliberate investment through coaching and training to ensure smooth transitions when leaders retire or move on.
Chapters
Challenge number 1: Leaders don't want to develop their own replacement. Think about that. This is the one that nobody says out loud, but it's so real. And it's much more common than you would ever imagine. When you ask a senior leader to actively identify and develop the person who will replace them, you're asking them to confront their own replaceability. Their own ending. And that is deeply uncomfortable. I had this happen twice in the last couple of weeks, one just a couple of days ago, and having a conversation with an individual talking about their succession planning and really working with them to not only identify this person, but then to talk about what support, what coaching, what training, what development they will need in order to be able to allow someone to step out of their position, whether that's through retirement, through termination, through wanting to take on a different opportunity even within the organization. Leaders have to be considering proactively who it would be capable of replacing, of supporting this role and moving everything that I built, so to speak, forward.
