The best is definitely not yet to come for too many leaders and the organizations they serve.
You may be a long way from retirement.
Or perhaps you’re a decade or less away.
Regardless of how long you have left in your leadership position, two things are certain:
- The time will go faster than you anticipate, and
- You’ll want to set the organization up for success after you’re gone.
Both of these succession realities work together. They also work against succession success.
Let’s consider each and then consider what we can do now to ensure succession success later.
Time Flies When You’re Having Fun
… and even when you’re not.
Time is an interesting thing. Time does not literally speed up as we age. There is a psychological reason it feels as if it does, however. The more frequently we encounter new experiences, the slower time seems to move. The newness of these experiences causes our brains to slow down for processing. As a child, nearly every experience is new, hence the time crawls by. As adults, we tend to encounter fewer and fewer new experiences, allowing time to move faster and faster.
As leaders prepare to step aside, the time typically rushes past. Why? Mostly because leaders nearing the end of their leadership tenures cease to do or try new things. A lack of new things expedites the clock. The saying should be, “Time flies when we stop doing new things.“
This brings us directly to the second reality:
Success After Succession
As a leader senses succession is a necessary conversation, it’s natural for them to also reflect on their past — past successes, strategies and methods, innovations, and yes, failures. The reflection period is personally healthy. It’s can also be organizationally dangerous.
If you’re a leader anywhere near the end of your leadership season, you know how it feels to consider the future. Your future is undoubtedly within consideration, but the organization’s future often takes center stage in your mind. You’ve given much of your life to what you now lead. You’ve seen all the good times and the bad. You’ve personally experienced the highs and lows. You find yourself saying things like “the best is yet to come” more frequently than ever before. And you mean it.
You want more than anything to see your organization thrive beyond your leadership.
So, you begin making decisions with this future success in mind to do that. For example, you know debt can cripple companies and churches, so you target being debt-free upon your transition. You know the next leader will adopt your most recent leadership decisions, so you begin deciding with this future unnamed and unidentified leader in mind. As opportunities come by your desk, you sense that the next leader will be tasked to lead later when you do today, so you pause longer than in the past.
This succession thinking is natural and normal.
This succession thinking is also going to destroy the next leader.
Successful Successions Can’t Focus on Successions
When your finish line impedes the next generation’s starting line, the organization is in trouble.
And it may never recover. Never.
Every organization has a natural life cycle. On the downside of the cycle, organizations must take risks to reintroduce growth and innovation in an established organization. Chances must be chosen. Opportunities must be grasped.
The moment you begin filtering your decisions through the typical succession lens, you start making the safest decisions in place of the best decisions. Your focus is one to five years away, but that short-term focus limits what could be accomplished in the next one, two, or three decades.
You don’t want the next leader to assume debt; therefore, you stop taking reasonable risks because they aren’t free. You don’t want the next leader to inherit an overstaffed organization, so you freeze hiring and intentionally reduce the headcount. Of course, this staffing reduction brings significant and immediate costs. But it’s okay. You’re thinking about the future. “The best is yet to come.”
It’s not.
The “best” happened when you embraced change, took risks, and tried new things. Not recklessly, of course. The best happened when you were leading, not managing.
To put it bluntly, as succession becomes your prevailing conversation, deciding to set up the next leader “safely” will destroy the very organization the next leader will attempt to lead.
Congratulations. You may exit with little or no debt. And the next leader will inherit a stagnate organization and antiquated model.
Getting Succession Right
To end well, you must lead well. You can’t manage your way to future success. Leadership is the act of innovation and creating. That’s what you must do to finish well and give the next leader a fighting chance.
Here are SIX actions to ensure the best is NOT yet to come:
1. Allow your best leaders to leave.
There is no guarantee your best and brightest leaders will remain. I can guarantee you they will leave if you begin pulling back on the organizational reigns and remove risk from the conversations. Leaders lead. If you stop leading, they won’t stop — they’ll just go somewhere else.
A better option: Get out of the way. And I literally and figuratively mean it. If you don’t allow the leaders within your organization to lead, they will leave. Give them something to own and allow them to lead as you did all those years ago.
2. Focus on your end date.
If you remain focused on your end date, the organizational end date may match. Focusing on your exit will inevitably ensure you remove focus from what must be true for the next leader. Short-term implications will define your decisions. Risk aversion will be normalized. Your exit will be the organizational focal point. Why not? It’s obviously yours.
A better option: Lead today like you did when you first began. If that scares you, good! Early in your leadership life, you took risks and seized opportunities. You didn’t play it safe, so don’t start now.
3. Make debt-free the organization’s financial goal.
If you can pay off all the debt while funding new opportunities, go for it. But, if you’re not intentional, the more you focus on your end date, the less you’ll fund innovations and risks.
If you lead a church, this debt focus will have compounding effects. People give to organizations they trust. We like to think people give to vision, but that’s a half-truth. People give to well-led and executed vision. They give to leaders they trust. The moment you begin playing it too safe, you’re going to lose some trust. Do it for too long, and the stagnancy of the organization will erode trust.
A better option: Stop overly worrying about risk assessments and debt reduction. If you were able to lead successfully with some debt, trust that your predecessor will be capable of doing the same.
4. Keep making all the decisions.
This is a massive problem in older organizations (and with more senior leaders). Of course, you have more experience and are better equipped to decide. That’s why you are the current leader. But the closer you get to your end date (or the more you begin looking ahead to that date), your ending will hamper your deciding. If you make all the decisions, you’re shutting out others who can provide a healthy check and balance to your mindset.
Personally, I don’t believe any leader at any age in any organization should be the lone decision-maker. First, no leader is that smart. Secondly, and more importantly, lone decision-making limits diversity of perspectives and inclusion of ideas. Every leader should take responsibility for all the decisions made, but they can’t make them all.
A better option: Stop it. Add people around you who are different than you. Give them authority and listen to them. And not defensively. Actually listen to their perspective and include them in the decision. I’m not suggesting you form an advisory team. Advisory teams advise, but they don’t decide. You must create a decision-making body that is diverse in age and stage.
5. Put yourself at the center of the organization until the end.
It will be nearly impossible to leave if you are the organization. You can’t leave yourself! If people attend or give or buy simply because of your presence, your departure will open the exit floodgates. You must find a way to make more of others and the organization over you.
A better option: In many organizations (especially churches), the senior pastor is the charismatic personality synonyms with the organization. That’s unavoidable in many cases. But it doesn’t have to be a succession death sentence. Wise leaders identify their successor and begin an intentional transition process years before the process is even made public. You may not be able to remove your face from the place. You can, however, add some faces and pass your baton of trust to them over time.
6. Remain rigid and inflexible.
You decided to end at a specific time in a particular way, and that’s precisely how it’s going to happen. I’m all for making decisions and providing clarity, but it’s impossible also to provide absolute certainty.
A better option: The only guarantee is that your plans will require flexibility. If you’re committed to adding others to the decision-making table, you’ll better adjust to changing times. It’s perfectly acceptable to remain set in your ways outside of organizational leadership. Drink your coffee the way you always have. But you can’t set and forget leadership.
Is the best yet to come?
That’s up to you. If you remain focused on managing your transition while forgetting the leadership previously required to build the organization, the best is most certainly behind you. A new leader may replace you in time, but they will fail. Best case, they will struggle. Success may only come through relaunching the organization over time. That doesn’t have to happen. If you can resist the succession temptations, you can say and believe “the best is yet to come.”
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