The Leadership Lens Summary:
The Leadership Compound Effect is always running. In a previous article, I focused on how it plays out through leadership selection decisions. This article takes it into equally consequential territory: coaching. Specifically, what it means to partner with a leader in a way that develops them and activates what they produce in the organization around them, particularly when it comes to succession, and why that distinction determines whether the Leadership Compound Effect works in your favor or runs on default.
Succession Is The Receipt
The moment an organization realizes it has a succession problem is almost never the moment it started.
It started years earlier, in how leaders were developed. More precisely, in how they were not developed to develop others. By the time the conversation turns to who is ready, the answer is already determined by the development decisions of the previous three to five years. The internal scan that finds no one ready, and the search mandate that triggers because there is simply no one in line aren’t the problem. They’re the receipt.
And the bill has been accumulating for a while.
By The Time It Becomes a Search, The Story Is Already Written
Across thirty years of executive search work, most searches I’ve solved have been because there was a significant succession gap.
Sure, some were in connection with a new role that was created or because a rare and required skill set didn’t exist inside the organization. But most searches were launched due to a default gap where no one was in line to step up because developing successors never quite became a priority. And because the organization waited until urgency arrived before asking who was ready and found that the answer was shaped by years of decisions that were never really about succession at all.
They were about individual performance, development, and results measured by individual metrics. And individually, many of those investments were sound. The problem is that coaching and development that’s oriented entirely toward the individual rarely builds strength beyond the individual when it’s left to chance.
When that’s the case, you end up with a wobbly bench, and a leadership culture built on dependency. And when the leadership void arises, it tests whether the pipeline has been built or not. Too often organizations discover the answer in real time, under pressure, and with limited options.
And that’s an expensive way to find out.
When A Leader’s Strength Becomes The Ceiling
The harder conversation, and the more important one, is about the leader in the room who is not developing the people around them.
The leader’s capability, judgment, expertise, and personal effectiveness earned them their seat. And that’s where the ceiling gets set.
Leaders who rise because of what they personally produce tend, without deliberate intervention, to keep producing rather than developing. They become the answer in every room rather than the leader who builds the capacity of everyone around them. The organization compounds its dependence on one person while the bench beneath them defaults to unrealized potential.
It’s a negative compounding developmental pattern, and one of the most consequential ones in organizational leadership. The shift from building around yourself to building beyond yourself isn’t a natural progression, and it doesn’t come easily to most. It’s a conscious choice, and for most leaders it requires intentional support to make. The leaders who make it shape the organization’s leadership succession effectiveness into the future. The ones who don’t leave a gap that no succession plan can fill retroactively.
Succession Goes Beyond The Role. It’s About Leadership Capacity.
Here’s where I’ve seen the succession conversation most often go wrong. Organizations think about successors in terms of functional fit, track record, technical readiness, and other qualifications. Those things matter but they’re the floor, not the ceiling.
The leaders’ organizations most need as successors can do what the organization needs today and what they need to move toward their future. That requires multiple intelligences and skills including the capacity to think clearly when the situation is ambiguous, to influence without relying on positional authority, to navigate the political and cultural dynamics that determine how decisions actually get made, to develop the people around them, and sustain their effectiveness as the context shifts beneath them.
These are what I call leadership intelligences. They’re not developed by proximity to a strong leader or acquired through a promotion. They are built deliberately, through coaching and development that is oriented from the start toward producing these capacities in others. A succession picture that doesn’t account for the depth of these intelligences in its leadership chain isn’t an intentionally designed succession plan. It’s a default plan.
A Bench Doesn’t Build Itself
When Doug Conant arrived as CEO of Campbell Soup Company in 2001, he inherited a company in serious trouble. Sales were declining, the stock price was falling, and employee engagement was at crisis levels. What he did next is a precise illustration of the Leadership Compound Effect in action.
Conant started with himself. He did the deep personal development work first with support and reflection alongside trusted advisors, examining his own leadership, his values, his approach, and what he needed to strengthen. Then he built the Campbell Leadership Model, a deliberate framework of leadership behaviors expected of every leader across the organization, with inspiring trust as the central requirement. He held the entire leadership chain accountable to it with rigorous annual engagement measurement. Leaders who couldn’t or wouldn’t develop their people were replaced by leaders who would.
The compounding effect was measurable and striking. Employee engagement was a key measurement. Ratios moved from deeply troubled to significantly strong by 2010. The company outperformed both the S&P Food Group and the S&P 500. Conant himself captured the underlying logic in a single line that says it all:
Out of a hundred decisions made in a day, 98 of them were made when you weren’t in the room.
You can think of that as a management observation, but it’s a development imperative. And it’s the reason the bench either gets built or it doesn’t.
My perspective is this. The difference between a bench and a bridge is movement. A bench is where potential waits. A bridge is where it elevates and advances. Organizations that coach through the leader build bridges. The ones that don’t build benches and wonder why no one is ready to advance.
Succession transitions that are activated with confidence rather than urgency get there because their leaders were developed to develop others, years before anyone needed to use what that investment produced. Succession planning is of course important. But too often the missing link is the deliberate preparation throughout the leadership chain.
Every coaching engagement, every development conversation, every deliberate investment in a leader’s capacity to elevate the people around them either builds the leadership bridge or leaves it to chance. Leadership growth compounds, in whichever direction it’s pointed.
Leaders who understand this build beyond themselves. Their measure of success is not only what they produced in their own role. It’s what they left behind in the people around them, in the quality of thinking on their teams, in the depth of leadership in the layers beneath them, in the succession confidence of the organization when their own chapter closes. That’s the kind of leadership that outlasts the leader. And it only happens with intent followed by commitment and choice.
The Question Worth Asking Before The Role Opens
The succession conversation is typically triggered by a departure, a transition, or a strategic shift. By then, the options are already shaped by the development decisions of the years preceding it.
The more valuable conversation happens much earlier, while the leader is still in the role, still in a position to develop the people around them with intention and time to spare.
One question makes that conversation concrete: if this leader stepped away tomorrow, who is ready, and what are they ready for?
The answer isn’t found solely in a succession plan. It’s found in a mirror, and what it reflects is not the organization’s succession readiness. It’s the quality and intent of the development that has been happening, or not happening, all along.
The succession planning meeting isn’t where the bench is built. It’s built through an organization’s leadership chain and in every coaching conversation, every development decision, and every moment a leader chooses to invest in the capacity of the people around them rather than simply in the results in front of them.
Organizations that get this right make a different choice about what coaching and development are for. And that choice, made consistently and with intention, is what the succession conversation looks like when it goes well.
Is your organization developing leaders, or developing leaders who develop leaders?
This is the work of LTA’s Executive & Leadership Coaching. With three decades of experience evaluating, selecting, and coaching executives, we partner with leaders and organizations to intentionally build leadership that extends beyond the individual leader.
The difference between where you are and where you want to be is in the steps you haven’t taken yet.
LTA | Leadership Intelligence
Read the companion article to this: Read the companion article to this: The Leadership Compound Effect: How Coaching Through Leaders Multiplies ROI
