Leading at Light Speed is a powerful leadership book for businesses, public agencies, and nonprofits revealing the 10 specific ways an organization must act and behave to build trust, spark innovation, and create a high-performing organization.
The Succession Paradox is a concept in Leading at Light Speed described in Chapter 9 along with three other Leadership Paradoxes. Buy the book to read about the other three.
Planning well for your own departure is known to be one of the true tests of a great leader. If a strong cadre of successors are in place, you’ve done well. If you leave the organization drowning, you have not succeeded. The question isn’t whether you have a succession plan. It’s how capable you are in surrounding yourself with people truly capable of measuring up and running the show. And therein lies the paradox.
Some of the seemingly most successful leaders fail to find the path through this paradox. They can’t handle the challenge of surrounding themselves with people who are ready to take their jobs. Again and again, we see examples of leaders failing to deal with the succession paradox.
On the other hand, we also see great success stories. The CEO of one of our client companies made a point of surrounding herself with capable potential leaders. Her board of directors knew that they could count on a bank of worthy successors should anything ever happen to her. At another, the CEO of a construction company made a conscious choice to confront this paradox. He held an off-site meeting devoted exclusively to planning the next wave of leaders in the firm. Together with his management team, they identified the selection criteria, evaluated the candidates, and then changed the management structure to give three colleagues the opportunity to buy into the firm.
Cutting through the succession paradox is easy once you let go of the notion of your own indispensability. It’s another fear you have to overcome – a fear of the unknown. This vital step is difficult for some, but it can not be denied that it is an essential brick in the road to high performance.
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