Succession Is a Test You Can't Study For
Leadership transitions reveal the true health of an organisation’s power structure more than any other event — and most founders avoid planning for it until it is too late to do well.
Every organisation believes its power structure is sound until the moment that structure is asked to do something it has never had to do before: transfer authority from one person to another. Succession does not create the weaknesses in an organisation’s governance. It exposes them, suddenly and often publicly, after years in which they were comfortably invisible because no one had needed to find out whether they were real.
This is what makes succession different from almost every other test a leadership structure faces. A strategic decision, a crisis, a difficult negotiation — these test the quality of judgment within an existing power structure. Succession tests the structure itself: whether authority can actually move, cleanly, from one person to another, or whether what looked like an organisational hierarchy was, in practice, a single individual’s personal network of relationships, wearing the formal trappings of a company. Most organisations do not know which of these they are until succession forces the question, and by then there is very little time left to discover the answer gently.
Succession tests whether authority can actually move, or whether what looked like a hierarchy was a single individual’s personal network wearing the formal trappings of a company.
I have observed this most clearly in founder-led organisations, where the gap between the formal structure and the real one tends to be widest, for an understandable reason: founders accumulate informal authority for years, often decades, simply by being the person who was present at every important decision since the beginning. Relationships with key clients, regulators, board members, and senior staff are built directly with the founder, not with the role the founder occupies. When succession planning treats this as a problem of identifying the right successor and updating an org chart, it badly underestimates what is actually required — because the thing being transferred is not a title. It is a dense, largely undocumented web of trust, history, and informal authority that took years to build and cannot be reassigned by announcement.
The organisations that navigate this well share a counterintuitive trait: they begin treating succession as a live structural question years before any departure is imminent, often before it is even openly discussed as succession at all. They do this by deliberately, gradually distributing the informal relationships and authority that have accumulated around a single individual — ensuring that key client relationships are not held exclusively by the founder, that board members have direct working relationships with senior leaders beyond the chief executive, that institutional knowledge exists in more than one person’s memory. This is slow, unglamorous work, with no clear moment of completion, which is precisely why it is so often deferred. There is rarely a pressing reason to do it today, until the day there is, and by then the deferred work of a decade cannot be compressed into the available time.
There is rarely a pressing reason to do it today, until the day there is, and by then the deferred work of a decade cannot be compressed into the available time.
The emotional dimension of this is rarely discussed as openly as the structural one, but it is, in my experience, just as significant a barrier. A founder who has built an organisation around their own judgment and relationships is being asked, by good succession practice, to deliberately reduce their own indispensability — to make themselves, in some real sense, less essential to the thing they built. This is a strange and uncomfortable request, and it is not surprising that it meets resistance, including resistance the founder may not consciously recognise in themselves. The avoidance rarely looks like refusal. It looks like always having a good reason why now is not quite the right time to begin.
What tends to force the issue, when it is forced at all, is a moment of genuine vulnerability — a health scare, an unexpected departure, a moment when the organisation is suddenly required to function for a period without its central figure, and discovers, in real time, how much of its actual operating capacity was concentrated in one person’s relationships and judgment. These moments are instructive precisely because they are involuntary. They show, with unusual clarity, what the real structure of the organisation is, stripped of the comfortable assumption that there will always be time to address it properly later.
The boards I have seen handle succession most effectively are the ones willing to ask an uncomfortable question on a regular cadence, well before any transition is imminent: if the chief executive were unexpectedly unavailable tomorrow, what would actually happen, in practice, not in policy? Who would the key clients call? Which relationships would need to be rebuilt from nothing, and which would transfer smoothly because they were never solely dependent on one person to begin with? The honesty of the answer to this question, asked repeatedly over years rather than once in a moment of crisis, is a better predictor of an organisation’s structural health than almost any other single diagnostic available to a board.
Succession, in this sense, is not really a future event to be planned for. It is a current condition to be honestly assessed — a standing measure of whether an organisation’s authority is genuinely distributed or merely appears to be, right up until the moment it is tested. Most organisations discover which one is true only when the test arrives uninvited. The ones that do well are simply the ones that found a way to ask the question before they were forced to.
Yanka Golemin provides private counsel to founders and principals navigating high-consequence decisions. Inquiries: counsel-inquiry@yankagolemin.com