Of Succession And Successors

By Olukorede Yishau

THERE IS a brutally frank question every serious institution should periodically ask: If our five most important people disappear tomorrow, can this organisation continue?

If the answer is no, there is a succession emergency. And if the answer is, “We will bring back someone who has already retired to continue running,” there is an even bigger emergency.

One of the greatest weaknesses of our organisational culture is that subordinates are often treated as foot soldiers rather than future commanders.

When it is time to decide who should lead, we suddenly remember that they are young, that they cannot hold the organisation together, that they still have time, that they should allow their senior colleagues to still run the show.

But, what we fail to realise is that there is a point at which experience stops being an asset and becomes a risk. It may sound strange to say this because we have been trained to worship experience.

We have become used to a situation where when an important assignment comes up, we ask: Who has done this before?

Who knows the terrain? Who knows the people? Who has the contacts? Who has been around long enough to understand how things work? And then we bring out the old hands. There is nothing wrong with this, but there is a danger in it.

The old hand is usually presented as the safe pair of hands, the person who has seen it all, survived every crisis and knows where the bodies are buried.

The old hand gets the difficult assignment, the old hand gets another appointment, the old hand gets called out of retirement, the old hand is asked to rescue the company, the association, the government agency, the media organisation, and so on.

But, most times nobody asks the more frightening question: Who has been prepared to take over from the old hand? This is where many organisations and societies begin to develop a problem they do not recognise until it is too late, a challenge that turns them to institutions without successors.

I have seen organisations in which young people constitute some majority, but they operate in the shadows. I have also seen top heavy ones. In both instances, the language of leadership frequently tells the young ones to wait. Then the same organisations and societies complain that young people are not prepared to lead, forgetting that leadership is not downloaded into the brain on the morning a person turns 50.

It is acquired through exposure, through sitting in difficult meetings, through managing people, through making decisions when the consequences are real, through getting something wrong and discovering how to fix it, and through being given responsibilities while somebody more experienced is still around to guide you.

If we keep young people away from responsibility until the old hands are suddenly unavailable, we should not be surprised when the succession crisis arrives. Old age comes with its complications. An old person can suddenly fall ill and be unable to carry out their duties. It comes with the territory. In that instance, what happens if there is no subordinate that has been properly prepared?

Don’t get me wrong; there is nothing wrong with an older leader. I absolutely believe that age is not incompetence, just as youthfulness does not automatically mean competence. There are foolish young people and extraordinarily wise older people. There are young people who should never be trusted with shredding a document, let alone head an organisation or government, and there are older people whose wisdom is worth more than several libraries.

What I am saying, in a nutshell, is that the issue is not age, it is succession. A 70-year-old leader who spends his final years in office producing five younger leaders who can successfully take over has probably served his institution better than a 50-year-old who spends 20 years making sure nobody beneath him becomes competent enough to take over.

We must ensure that the “old hand” culture doesn’t become a curse. When one person becomes the only person who knows how something works, the organisation has failed. When one politician becomes the only person who can win an election, the political party has failed. When one executive becomes the only person who understands the business, the company has failed. When one civil servant becomes the only person capable of handling a critical national assignment, the ministry has failed. In these instances, the individuals may be brilliant, but the institutions are not.

It should be taken for granted that a healthy institution should be able to lose a brilliant person without losing its ability to function. That is what succession planning is supposed to achieve. Unfortunately, succession is often treated as an obituary exercise. We start thinking about who will replace somebody after the person has died, resigned, retired or become too ill to continue. By then, it may be too late.

Serious multinational companies do not wait for the chief executive to collapse before asking who should run the company. They build leadership pipelines. Governments should do the same, political parties should do the same, universities should do the same, media should do the same, professional associations should toe this line and families building businesses that are meant to outlive the founders should do the same.

Organisations must become schools of leadership rather than machines for recycling familiar names. There are companies in which the founder refuses to let anyone make an important decision because nobody can do it “the way I do it”. Eventually, the company becomes a monument to the founder’s personality and employees learn obedience instead of leadership.

They are unable to use their initiatives because they have learnt how to wait for instructions rather than how to make judgements. When the founder dies, everybody suddenly discovers that the company was not an institution, but one man’s memory.

An organisation can appear strong because one old hand knows how to fix everything. But sometimes what looks like stability is simply dependency wearing a suit. The wiser approach is intergenerational leadership. I plead for the sake of tomorrow: Let the old hands teach, let the young people participate, let experience sit beside innovation, let institutional memory meet new thinking, let younger people take difficult assignments while older people remain available to advise them and let them fail while the consequences are still manageable.

Expecting perfection from young people will get us nowhere. Every experienced hand once made mistakes so we must allow young leaders to make mistakes and learn from those teething stages. A society or organisation that refuses to allow young people to make small mistakes will eventually force them to make enormous mistakes when responsibility finally arrives.

Every veteran has a duty to prepare the next one to happily answer the question of “Whom have I prepared to replace me?” That is the real test of leadership.

The greatest leader in an organisation may not be the person who remains indispensable for 30 years, but the person who spends those 30 years making sure the organisation can survive without him because the baton was never meant to remain permanently in one hand.

An organisation that keeps telling its young people that their time will come, without giving them the opportunity to prepare for that time, should not be shocked when the future finally arrives and discovers that nobody has been trained to receive it.

My final take: The future does not announce its arrival. It simply comes. And when it does, experience alone will not save us. We will need successors. And a way to avoid this is when organisations can confidently say that if their five most important people disappear tomorrow, they will continue to run with little or no disruption.