Your employees are talented, but are they wired to lead and be part of the succession plan? Every owner reaches a point where the conversation shifts from running the business to securing its future. While technical skill gets a candidate in the room, it is trust that decides who stays. One strong hire can anchor your vision, but one wrong choice can fracture teams and destabilize the firm you spent years building.
Succession is not merely a test of capability; it is a test of judgment. Your future leaders must be skilled enough to grow the company and grounded enough to protect it.
Identifying the Builders for Succession
Healthy firms grow around “Business Builders.” Think of them as team members who act with clarity, purpose, and transparency. They earn the right to steer by showing their work and sharing credit. You can identify them by how they handle pressure, explain their reasoning, and treat colleagues who cannot directly help them. These leaders steady others and protect the mission even when no one is watching.
For these leaders to be authentic, their personas should exude balanced confidence, compassionate honesty, servant leadership and true dedication to the organization.
Confidence should come from helping others succeed, rather than building their own power centers. Experience can help this trait, but it should be inherent. Compassionate honesty helps others grow. Service to developing team members and capabilities is a must.
Many talk a good game here, but true servant leadership is rare. Finally, passion for organizational success must succeed personal accolades.
Spotting the Red Flags
To protect your legacy, you must recognize specific archetypes that weaken a company.
- Power Aggregators: These individuals collect authority rather than responsibility. They build private empires by centralizing information and framing issues to increase their personal leverage. They thrive in ambiguity because it creates influence.
- Team Destroyers: Their work may look fine on the surface, but morale drops in their wake. They create internal winners and losers, causing good people to leave. They use proximity to leadership as currency and leverage stress to pressure colleagues.
- Business Deconstructors: These individuals lack “system-level” thinking. They chase personal wins and quick results by overruling processes and making decisions in isolation. By the time the damage is visible, the underlying structure has already shifted.
Metrics to Inform Decisions for Succession Strategy
To move beyond intuition, owners should use specific metrics to fill the leadership bench. These measures can be qualitative and quantitative. Often, a simple 1-to-5 scoring protocol will suffice.
- Leadership Stability and Team Health: These metrics look beyond surface-level output to measure the human cost of a leader’s style.
- Voluntary Turnover Rate: High churn within a specific department often signals a “Team Destroyer” who causes good people to leave.
- Bench Strength Score: This measures the number of “promotable” employees developed under a leader. True leaders elevate others, while those who fear competition avoid mentoring.
- Team Pulse Survey Score: Conduct quarterly checks to reveal shifts in trust, clarity, and teamwork within a leader’s area.
- Operational Integrity and Decision-Making: These indicators identify those who might produce quick results while weakening long-term structure.
- Process Discipline Rate: Track adherence to established workflows. Deconstructors frequently skip steps to boost short-term numbers.
- Information Transparency Index: Evaluate if a leader shares facts, asks for input, and explains their reasoning. This identifies “Power Aggregators” who hoard data for leverage.
- Decision Escalation Speed: Measure how quickly a leader surfaces problems; hidden issues often signal misaligned motives.
- Collaboration and Mission Alignment
- Cross-Functional Collaboration Score: Use projects to test if a leader shares ownership or withholds resources.
- Peer Recognition/Feedback Score: Utilize a trusted circle of senior staff to gather honest feedback on who they trust.
- Incentive Alignment Ratio: Evaluate how much of a leader’s success is tied to collective team outcomes versus personal wins.
The Successor Readiness Score
To formalize the transition, candidates should be rated on a weighted average of four core traits:
- Judgment: The ability to see the system and protect long-term health.
- Communication: Clarity in explaining decisions and steadying others under pressure.
- Stability: Maintaining high standards without creating chaos.
- Team Outcomes: Proven ability to build strong teams, not personal empires.
Succession is not just about capability; it is about choosing the outcome instead of letting circumstances choose for you. When you read signals early, like information hoarding or rising staff churn, you avoid handing the wheel to someone who sees the role as power rather than responsibility. A disciplined plan protects the company’s value, stabilizes teams and preserves the business identity you spent years shaping.
Watch for the next article in the Business Builders for Integrators series that will explore how better leadership often hides in plain sight.
Ron Pence is an accomplished business executive with CI industry experience.
