The Last Two Years

The date is set, or nearly. Two years remain, and the question is what a leader can still usefully do with them.

Most people in this position either do too much, launching things their successor will inherit without having chosen them, or quietly stop, which the organization detects long before anyone acknowledges it.

Announcing changes what you are

The moment a departure becomes known, the calculation everybody around you runs changes, and it changes immediately rather than gradually.

Decisions with consequences beyond your tenure start being weighed against an unknown successor’s preferences. People with a project you have blocked begin waiting rather than arguing. Others start positioning for what comes next, which is rational and not disloyal. Your authority over anything long-term declines sharply while your authority over anything immediate stays intact.

This is why the timing of the announcement is itself a decision. Announce too early and you spend a long stretch as a diminished figure. Announce too late and the organization has no time to prepare, and the search happens under pressure. Somewhere between nine and eighteen months is the range most people find workable, and the right point depends mostly on how long a credible search takes in your sector.

What is still worth doing

The list is shorter than the available time suggests, and everything on it shares a property: it makes the next person’s job possible rather than committing them to anything.

Resolve what you have been avoiding. The underperformer nobody has addressed, the contract on unfavourable terms, the dispute that has been allowed to persist. These are the things a departing leader is uniquely positioned to handle, because the cost of handling them is largely social and you are leaving. Passing them to a successor as their first act is a genuine unkindness, since they will have to spend capital they have not yet accumulated.

Write down what is in your head. Not procedures, which exist. The reasoning behind arrangements that look arbitrary, the history of why something is done a particular way, which relationships are fragile and why, which apparent problems are load-bearing. This is the material that is genuinely lost otherwise, and it takes considerably longer than anyone allocates.

Introduce your successor to the relationships. Deliberately, in person, and with an explicit transfer of standing rather than a handshake. This is the one thing that cannot be documented and cannot be done after you leave.

Finish or stop things. An initiative half-completed at handover is a decision imposed on somebody who did not make it. Either land it or close it cleanly and say why.

What is not

Launching a major new direction in a final year is common and is nearly always a mistake, whatever its merits.

The successor inherits a commitment they did not choose, made by somebody who will not answer for it, and their first substantive act must be either to continue something they may not believe in or to reverse it and appear to be repudiating their predecessor before they have any standing. Both outcomes cost them, and the cost was created by a leader wanting a final accomplishment.

The honest question to ask is whether this would still seem urgent if you were staying another eight years. Frequently it would not, and what is actually being pursued is a legacy rather than a need.

Leaving properly

The final act is the one most often mishandled, and it happens after the last day.

Go. Do not attend the meetings, do not take the calls from people seeking a second opinion on your successor’s decisions, and do not maintain a parallel channel with the board. Every one of these feels like continued service and functions as an undermining, because as long as you are available the organization has two authorities and will route around whichever is inconvenient.

Say once, publicly, that the decisions are now theirs. Then be genuinely available if asked and never available otherwise. A predecessor who is reachable but silent is an asset. One who is reachable and opinionated is the single most common reason a capable successor fails in the first year.

The measure

The test of a tenure is not what was achieved during it. It is what continues afterward without the person who achieved it.

An organization that performs well for three years after a leader leaves was well led. One that declines immediately was held together by a person rather than built into something, whatever the results looked like at the time. That is an uncomfortable standard, because it cannot be assessed until the leader is no longer present to be credited with it, and it is the only one that distinguishes a good operator from somebody who built an institution.