Exiting with dignity: a guide to CEO succession

How CEOs can plan their departure with grace and ensure a smooth transition. A practical guide to one of the most overlooked aspects of executive leadership.

Too many CEOs sabotage their own legacy by clinging to power past their prime, mistaking personal comfort for organizational necessity and leaving their companies vulnerable to chaos and decline.

Succession is not only an issue for American Presidents like Joe Biden. CEOs also must stop sooner or later. All too often, we tend to stay too long in our positions of power. Why? Because we are delusional with ourselves. We don’t know what else to do. We get a bit too comfortable and used to the status and power of the position. We fall victim to inertia. It’s what we’ve always done and where we focused on for the last 30-40 years. Not strange that it’s complicated to let that go and move on. Perhaps it's more psychological than we'd like to admit to ourselves. After all, we’re only human.

Key takeaways

• If you want to exit with dignity, proactively seek honest feedback from five to ten trusted people—inside and outside your professional circle—about your leadership peak and succession timing.
• Leaders who ignore their emotional attachment to the CEO role risk chaotic succession and missed opportunities for stakeholder value, sometimes even causing business collapse or bankruptcy.
• You must continuously invest in your self-awareness and actively solicit feedback, because it’s almost impossible to look at yourself objectively when considering your own succession.

It’s almost impossible to look at ourselves objectively. And when people have the guts to try to tell us something, we easily push their observations away as ‘untrue’. Instead, we let our emotions overwhelm us. We believe that our feelings are more important than the interests of the company. We fail to leave our ego at the door.

The result is that many organizations go through chaotic succession processes. And when it happens, they’re missing out on opportunities to create value for their stakeholders. It’s shallow and short-term thinking. In some of the worst cases of succession gone wrong, it even leads to the collapse of a business. Sometimes even bankruptcy.

It’s almost impossible to look at ourselves objectively.

Building self-awareness

Invest in your self-awareness. Continue to invite people actively to give you feedback. This should never stop.

Specifically for your succession: reach out to five to ten people that you trust. People with different or, even better, no interest in your succession. People from your private life and in your professional circles. Ask them: when is it time for me to retire? Do you think I am past my peak? What do you advise me to do? Only ask questions for clarification and wrap up by saying: thank you!

Talk to someone trusted who is outside your business. Open yourself up and allow yourself to receive some support. This is one of those situations where assistance can make a huge difference. Allow yourself to receive. Don’t try to solve everything yourself; it’s not in your self-interest.

Plan your succession early

Start very early to plan for your own succession. This can be as soon as you accept your position as CEO. A healthy succession process can easily take five to seven years.

Develop a pipeline of potential successors. Ideally three. Manageable and spreading the risks. Start to pull them closer and invest in their development.

Inspire yourself and talk to people that have already taken this step. Ask them about their experiences. See what inspires you from their stories and decide what might work for you too.

If you’ve dedicated your life to your work and less so to your private and family life, have no regrets. You cannot change the past anyway. What you can do is place different priorities for the time to come and start your next chapter today!

And to finish with a cliché: enjoy the journey! Nobody ever survived life. The graveyard is full of people who couldn’t be missed. But life and business goes on, with and without us. The sooner we make peace with this, the better it is for ourselves and for our environment.

Let people remember what you have meant for the business. Try to identify your peak and where you are today. Leave a positive legacy. Stop. Move on. Make peace with your emotions and create the roadmap for the next phase of your life.

Over to you.