What I learned from training my successor three times

At the end of every turnaround I have led, I left having chosen and trained the person who would take over. This was not a graceful flourish at the close of an engagement: it was the condition for the work to hold.

A company turned around by one person stays fragile for as long as that person is there. The day they leave, the organisation discovers that it had not changed at all: it had simply adapted to somebody.

The exit is designed on the first day

This is the most counter-intuitive part. People think about their succession as the engagement winds down; it needs thinking about as it begins. In practice, that means identifying within the first few weeks who, inside the team or outside it, could take over, and shaping the mandate so that this person grows while the turnaround is under way.

What that involves, and it is not comfortable

• Delegate before you feel safe doing so. Wait for the situation to stabilise before handing over decisions, and it is already too late: the engagement is ending.
• Let them fail, on a small scale. Nobody learns to decide by watching someone else decide. You have to accept mistakes you could easily have spared yourself.
• Choose on trajectory, not on current performance. The best operator is not always the future leader, and the quietest person sometimes is.
• Hand over before you go. A few weeks in which the decisions are theirs while you are still in the building, so the team sees the transition happen rather than hearing it announced.

There is an unexpected benefit to this discipline: it changes the way the team looks at you during the engagement. Someone who is known to be leaving, and who prepares that departure openly, is not read as a threat. It becomes easier to tell them the truth, and in a turnaround that is what you need most.