24 Feb When Succession Is a Surprise
By Margaret Wilson, Tandem Partners & Ann Quinn, Quinn Strategy Group
Sometimes succession is truly a surprise. Other times it only feels like one. The difference matters, because what you do next and what you should have done before are not the same.
There are moments when leadership changes overnight. A health crisis abruptly sidelines the CEO. A board forces an immediate transition. A scandal makes continued leadership impossible. In these situations, organizations don’t have the luxury of developmental work. They must stabilize quickly. This is crisis leadership, and it prioritizes steadiness over strategy. But most succession doesn’t happen this way.
More often, a transition feels sudden because the organization wasn’t prepared. The signals were there, and the timing was foreseeable. What was missing was readiness. A successor was named but not fully empowered. Decision making still ran through one leader. The board discussed succession without planning for governance beyond the founder. When transition finally began, it felt abrupt not because it was unpredictable, but because leadership hadn’t been built into the system itself.
When people think about succession, they usually focus on the CEO role. Who will take over. Whether a successor is ready. When the handoff will occur. While critical, CEO succession is a surface transition. The deeper question is whether leadership has been built across the organization. Succession isn’t a seat change. It’s a system change.
Two different organizational capabilities come into play. Crisis capability allows an organization to stabilize itself when leadership disappears overnight. Development capability ensures leadership is never concentrated in one role to the point of destabilizing the system. Organizations build development capability over time through bench strength, successor exposure, shared decision rights, governance readiness, and the systems and processes that reduce reliance on any single leader.
When succession feels chaotic, leaders often blame the transition. But the instability probably began well before. Succession exposes it quickly. Stakeholders begin questioning the successor’s legitimacy. People grow watchful. Internal positioning intensifies. What people experience as succession shock often reflects how dependent the organization has been on one leader.
Sometimes succession truly is a surprise. Organizations will always face moments beyond their control. But instability is preventable. You can build leadership capability beyond any single leader, deepen your bench, strengthen governance, and create the systems and structures that keep the organization steady when leadership changes.
Succession shouldn’t test whether one person can be replaced. It should reveal that leadership already exists beyond them.
For families in business, success is not just measured in fiscal years, but over generations. Yet often, leaders are so focused on the day-to-day that they aren’t able to step back and focus on the issues that impact long-term sustainability. We help leadership teams assess where they are now, where they’re trying to go and how they’re going to get there. Our expertise in the areas of organizational strategy, structure, process and performance is a unique feature of our work, and integral to our transition management approach.
Most leaders accept that at some time in the future, their time at the helm will end and the business will be given into the care of the next leader. However, just thinking about the transition can be daunting and overwhelming for the senior leader. If that weren’t enough, most owners experience their own succession just once. Tandem Partners provides the experience and professional guidance needed to move through the strategic, operational and interpersonal issues that are all a part of transition.