Preparing a successor before the seat is theirs.

Succession has stopped being a someday problem. A record 2,221 chief executives left US companies in 2024, by the count of Challenger, Gray and Christmas, and public companies set their own record the year after. Boards are feeling it. In a 2024 director survey by Corporate Board Member and Farient Advisors, nearly two-thirds said the wave of executive turnover had forced fresh conversations in the boardroom, and most of those conversations arrive later than they should.

And most succession planning still stops at the exact point the work should start. Somebody is named, a slide gets updated, the item is marked done. But naming a successor only identifies one. It does not prepare them, and the distance between those two things is where a lot of good handovers quietly come apart. The bill for getting it wrong is not small. The Harvard Business Review has put the market value lost to badly handled CEO and senior transitions at close to a trillion dollars a year across the S&P 1500, and much of that is not the wrong choice of person. It is the right person, handed the chair without ever having been made ready to sit in it.

Named is not the same as ready

A successor who has been picked but not prepared walks in carrying two problems. They have watched the role from outside, which teaches its shape but not its weight. And they inherit a set of relationships, debts and half-finished arguments that belonged to the last occupant and do not transfer cleanly with the title. Preparation is the work of shrinking that distance while there is still time, not after the door has closed. The widest part of the gap, and the part almost nobody plans for, is behaviour under a pressure the successor has never personally carried.

What preparing someone really takes

Three things, and none of them fast. The first is real exposure to the decisions as they actually are, not a tidied-up version, because a successor who only ever sees the clean cut of the role is being shielded from the precise situations that will one day test them. There has to be an honest reckoning too, with their own pattern under strain, so the strength that carried them this far is understood before it curdles into the thing that trips them. And relationships have to be handed over slowly, so that in time the board and the leadership team come to trust the successor in their own right, and not as a stand-in for whoever came before.

The right person, handed a chair no one ever made them ready to sit in.

The part the incumbent plays

People frame succession as a problem for the person arriving. At least as much of it belongs to the person leaving. An outgoing leader who cannot loosen their grip on authority, who keeps the decisions that matter in their own hands right up to the last morning, hands across a role that has never once been rehearsed. The most generous thing they can do is the opposite of that: let the successor carry real weight while there is still a net underneath.

Doing it in earnest

This kind of preparation does not happen in a review meeting with a template on the screen. It happens privately, over years, and it is uncomfortable, because it asks a capable person to sit with the parts of the role they are not yet equal to while they still have room to close the gap. The discomfort is doing its job. It costs far less than the alternative, which is a successor learning those same lessons in the chair, in full view, with the whole organisation for an audience.