What We Leave Behind: Succession as a Leadership Responsibility

One of the most important—and least discussed—responsibilities of leadership is succession.

We tend to think of a CEO’s job in terms of what happens while they’re in the seat: setting strategy, building culture, allocating resources, making difficult decisions. But a significant measure of leadership comes later. What happens when you’re no longer there? Did you build a senior team capable of carrying the company forward? Did you develop people who could step into greater responsibility? Did you create an organization resilient enough to withstand your departure? And, perhaps hardest of all, when the time came, could you let go?

I had a front-row seat to one such transition at GeoCities. I was on the board and later remained as a board observer. As the company prepared to go public, the board concluded that David Bohnett, the founder and CEO, wasn’t the right person to lead the company through its next stage.

I disagreed with that decision. David disagreed, too. But eventually he did something that strong leaders are sometimes called upon to do: he disagreed and committed. Rather than being pushed aside, he was pushed up. He became executive chair and helped lead the search for his successor.

A founder leaving the CEO role can easily become a story of rejection. The board loses confidence. The founder feels wounded. The incoming CEO feels threatened by the continuing presence of the person who built the company. What begins as a governance decision can become a psychological drama, with the organization caught in the middle.

That isn’t what happened at GeoCities. Tom Evans was brought in as CEO, and he and David worked well together. Tom led the company through its IPO, and within months GeoCities was acquired by Yahoo. We never really learned what Tom might have become as a long-term CEO because the story moved so quickly. But the transition itself worked.

And it worked, in part, because David could stop being CEO without having to stop mattering.

That may be the deeper challenge of succession. It isn’t merely choosing the next person. It’s creating enough psychological and organizational space for that person to lead while preserving the wisdom, dignity, and contribution of the person who came before.

Done badly, succession becomes a repudiation. Done well, it becomes an act of stewardship. Leaders eventually discover that the job was never simply to occupy the seat. The job was to prepare the organization for the day when someone else would.