My Dream Is Not Your Dream

Elevation Gain | Post 4 of 6

Before I left for Italy, my sister Lydia said something I've been carrying around the mountains with me.

"It's not what I'd want to be doing, but I'm glad you're doing it."

She didn't pretend to want my dream. She didn't audit my dream. She just wanted me in it. I've spent a career around leaders and I can count on one hand the number of times I've heard a boss say a sentence that generous to someone on their team.

Easy, according to whom

Some of the trail maps here rate the routes. Easy. Medium.

Easy according to whose legs? Whose lungs? Whose thirty years of hiking or complete lack of them? The rating is the subjective part. My medium involves elevation gain, a little burn, and a view that makes you say something out loud to nobody. Someone else's medium is flat and ends near gelato. Neither of us is wrong. The map is wrong, for pretending there's one answer.

Organizations rate people the same way, and with the same confidence.

"She's ready." "He's not ready." "Give her two more years." The CEO says it in a compensation meeting and it becomes the plan. The rating comes from the CEO's own legs, her own first year, her own memory of what ready felt like. A sample size of one, applied to everyone.

And underneath the readiness rating sits a bigger assumption that almost never gets checked: that the person on the bench wants the trail the CEO is on.

Some do. Some want a different summit entirely and have never been asked, because the succession plan was built in a room they weren't in. Some want the top job and have been quietly rated "not ready" for six years by people who have never had the conversation. I've coached that leader. She knew exactly what she wanted. She hadn't been able to say it out loud at work, ever.

I've always known it. I haven't always been able to do it. That sentence belongs to more of your high-potentials than you'd guess.

A real succession plan starts with a question, asked directly, to every person you think is on the bench: what do you want, and what would it take?

Then it takes a real read on readiness, from an instrument or a structured process rather than a gut. Then it puts support behind the gap instead of waiting for the gap to close on its own, which it does not do.

That's the whole method. It's less complicated than the retreat where you rank everyone on a nine-box and then don't tell them.

The most useful thing a CEO can say to a successor is a version of my sister's line. It's not the path I'd take. I'm glad you're taking it. Here's what I can do to help.

Who's on your bench that you've never actually asked?