What Founders Get Wrong About Succession
The handover is treated as an event. The people who have done it well describe something closer to a five-year apprenticeship, run in reverse.
Almost every founder describes succession as a decision. The people who have completed one describe it as a process that began several years before anybody used the word, and that consisted mostly of the founder giving things away.
The distinction matters because it determines when you start. A decision can be taken in the final year. A process cannot, and the founders who leave it to the final year discover that the thing they are handing over is not an organisation but a set of relationships that run exclusively through them.
The three handovers
Executives who have watched several transitions tend to break the problem into three separate handovers that are usually mistaken for one. There is the transfer of authority, which is legal and takes an afternoon. There is the transfer of relationships — customers, regulators, the difficult board member — which takes eighteen months of deliberate introductions. And there is the transfer of narrative: the moment the organisation stops explaining itself with reference to the founder.
I could sign the authority over in a morning. It took two years before anyone stopped checking with me afterwards.
The third is the hardest and the least discussed, partly because it requires the founder to be diminished in a story they wrote. Boards rarely help. A board that has spent a decade treating the founder as the ultimate escalation point will keep doing so out of habit, and every escalation quietly informs the organisation that the successor is provisional.
- Move the difficult relationships first, while there is still time to repair a bad introduction.
- Give the successor a decision the founder disagrees with — and then do not overturn it.
- Agree, in writing, what the founder will no longer be asked about.
- Leave the building. Not permanently, but properly, and early enough that the absence is survivable.
The case for going early
The most consistent regret is timing, and it runs in one direction. Almost nobody says they moved too soon. What they describe instead is a period — typically two or three years — in which they knew the answer, had identified the person, and did nothing, because the organisation was performing well and there was no forcing event.
That absence of a forcing event is the trap. Succession planned during a good year is a strategy. Succession planned during a bad one is damage control, and the difference is visible to everyone inside the building.
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