Expertise
Leadership & Succession
Do we have the right leadership for what comes next, and is the next transition prepared?
Most leadership questions do not arrive as a vacancy. They arrive as a doubt: whether the team that brought the company this far is the team to take it further; whether a successor is genuinely ready or merely next; whether a member of the family should be considered at all, and how anyone could judge that fairly.
Succession is the same question with a longer horizon. It is treated as an event and lived as a period, and the work that determines whether it goes well happens years before anything is announced. That is why the two belong together rather than apart.
What I work on
The work concerns the fit between the leadership a company has and the leadership its next chapter will require, which is rarely the same as the leadership that has served it well until now. In practice that means examining whether credible internal successors exist and what would have to be true for them to be ready. It means assessing an executive, or a member of the family, in a way that the board and the family can both accept as fair, which is harder to achieve than it sounds and is usually where these conversations founder.
It means defining the profile of chair or chief executive the company will need in five years rather than the one it needed five years ago. And it means accompanying a newly appointed chief executive through the first year, which is where more appointments fail than at the moment of choosing.
On the succession side the questions arrive in a sequence, and they are more practical than they are delicate: who could succeed, when preparation should begin, how internal, family and external candidates can be compared fairly on the same terms, what role the outgoing leader should keep and for how long, and how a transition can be conducted without destabilising either the organisation or the family.
Readiness is not the same as choice
Preparing someone and choosing someone are different pieces of work, and confusing them causes a great deal of avoidable difficulty. A member of the family may become an owner, a director, an executive, or an engaged shareholder who never works in the company, and each of those is a role that has to be learned.
Here I work on the leadership side of that: development plans, mentoring, exposure to the board and honest assessment. The wider question of how a family prepares a generation, rather than an individual, belongs with Family & Ownership.
When people call me
A chief executive or chair transition is approaching, or has suddenly become unavoidable.
The board is not certain whether credible internal successors exist.
A member of the family is a candidate, and the family needs an assessment it can trust.
An outgoing leader is finding it difficult to define what comes next for them.
Where search fits
I spent three decades conducting board and chief executive searches. That experience is why I am able to answer these questions, and it means that where a mandate genuinely requires an external search for a chief executive or a chair, I can conduct it.
But a search is an instrument, not the offer. It is one possible answer to a leadership question, never the starting point, and frequently not the answer at all. When it is the right route, the search serves the wider mandate rather than replacing it, and the same judgement that shaped the question shapes the appointment. That is a different proposition from a search firm with an appointment waiting to be placed.
