Somebody has run a firm, a district, or a department for twenty years. They are competent, they are not finished, and they have perhaps a decade left in the role.
Most people in that position spend the decade doing what they have been doing, and the transfer that should have occupied it happens in the final fortnight or not at all.
The window is now, not later
The reasoning for deferring is always the same and it is always wrong in the same way.
There is no successor yet. The organization is in a difficult period. The retirement date is not settled. Each is true and none improves with waiting, because the conditions being waited for do not arrive — they are replaced by an announcement and a last two months consumed by transition logistics.
What is actually available at fifty-five and unavailable at sixty-eight is time. Time to develop somebody, to be talked out of things in front of people, to hand over relationships gradually, and to discover that a successor’s different approach works.
Four things to do with the decade
Separate what is essential from what is you. Going through the practices that define the place and marking each. Nobody else can do this, and a successor without it will either preserve everything or change things at random.
Start deciding out loud. Reasoning stated, decisions argued rather than announced, and occasionally being talked out of something where people can see. This builds the organization’s capacity to run on reasoning rather than on your standing, which is the thing that does not transfer.
Give somebody real decisions. Bounded, consequential, and genuinely theirs, with you not intervening. Judgment forms no other way, and an organization that has never let anybody else decide anything has no successor whatever its plan says.
Record what you hold. An afternoon, the eight questions, a dozen cases in your own words. It is the item with a fixed deadline and the one only you can supply.
Why it feels like diminishment
Worth naming, because the reluctance is real and treating it as mere avoidance does not resolve it.
Every item above reduces the organization’s dependence on one person, and that dependence is a substantial part of how somebody has understood their own value for two decades. Making yourself less necessary is not a neutral act.
It is also the work. An institution that cannot operate without a particular person has not been built; it has been occupied, and the distinction becomes visible on exactly one day.
The reframe that helps is that the decade’s task is different from the previous two, not lesser. Twenty years of running it, and ten of ensuring it runs without you.
The people who left because you stayed
A cost that is already being paid and is invisible because it takes the form of absences.
Capable people below a long-tenured leader can calculate their own prospects. Where the top position is occupied indefinitely and no other real authority is available, they leave over several years, and each departure is attributed to a better offer.
Which produces the outcome the leader most fears — no successor — through the mechanism of their own tenure.
What breaks the loop is real authority distributed before anybody has to leave to get it, and a stated horizon so that people can decide whether waiting is reasonable rather than guessing.
Answer the other question too
The one that determines whether any of the above actually happens.
What are you going to do afterward? A person with no answer will find reasons to defer indefinitely, and the reasons will be about the organization rather than about themselves and will sound entirely credible.
Somebody who has an answer — another institution to serve, work of a different kind, something they have deferred for thirty years — makes the transition on a schedule, because they are moving toward something rather than away from everything.
The two questions are separable and are almost never separated, which is why so many transitions are forced by health rather than chosen.
What the decade is worth
The state has a large number of people currently in this window, holding institutions that will need to function after them.
Almost none of them will be asked to spend the decade this way, no mechanism exists to prompt it, and nobody will notice the ones who do until long afterward.
Which makes it a decision each of them takes alone, on their own initiative, for the benefit of people who will not know it was taken. That is the definition of stewardship this Library has been working toward, and this is where it actually gets exercised.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD