When bosses exit, without leaving

It becomes harder when the incumbent has stayed long enough to become larger than the job. Long-serving leaders accumulate something that cannot be transferred through a handover note. Their habits become culture, preferences become policy, and judgements become precedents. Eventually, the organisation cannot distinguish between the institution and the individual running it. This is when succession planning begins to resemble the search for a replacement spouse. The requirement is contradictory: find someone different enough to be a new leader but similar enough to ensure nothing changes.

Many high-profile recent instances show that India Inc has produced several such examples of people who remained the defining figure for their organisations for decades. The problem in such cases is not necessarily that the old boss refuses to leave. He may genuinely want to. The problem is that everybody else has forgotten how to imagine the organisation without him.

So the former boss survives as a kind of corporate poltergeist. “That’s not how Mr X would have done it,” somebody says, and Mr X, who is possibly playing golf far away, is suddenly back in the conference room. Founders are particularly accomplished at this form of afterlife. So are charismatic CEOs and chairmen who stayed long enough for personal preference to become institutional tradition. They may surrender the corner office, company car, and executive assistant, but somehow retain custody of the organisation’s imagination. Their successors inherit not just a job but an invisible colleague.

This colleague is especially formidable because he cannot be contradicted. The new CEO proposes something. Someone remembers that the old CEO tried it in 2007. The new CEO wants to reorganise a division. Someone recalls why Mr X specifically designed it that way. Before long, the successor discovers that his principal task is not running the company but conducting a daily referendum on whether he is sufficiently like the person he replaced. Worse, the predecessor does not even have to intervene. His former colleagues do it for him.

This is why organisations find succession much harder than succession planning. Leadership is supposed to be a job; over time, it becomes an identity — for both leader and institution. Employees who have spent years learning what pleased the boss cannot suddenly unlearn it. Boards prize “continuity”, one of those corporate words that sounds unquestionably virtuous until one asks how much continuity is enough. Successors themselves invoke predecessors because borrowed authority is useful while their own is still being established. The safest sentence in many companies remains: “This is how we have always done it.”

There is, of course, good reason to preserve institutional memory. A company that treats every incoming CEO as Year Zero will repeatedly rediscover old mistakes at considerable expense. But memory should advise the present, not govern it. The point of succession is not to find a convincing impersonator of the previous leader. It is to allow someone else to lead.

Perhaps every succession plan therefore needs something management textbooks discuss less enthusiastically: an extinction plan. Not for the boss, obviously, but for his authority. Which decisions now belong entirely to the successor? When does consultation stop? Which traditions survive because they remain sensible, and which because nobody wants to be the first to say, “Mr X was wrong”? Boards might usefully spend as much time planning the predecessor’s disappearance as the successor’s arrival.

The ultimate test of succession, after all, may not be whether the old boss can leave. It is whether everybody else can let him. Every organisation needs a memory but it does not need a ghost.