As a CEO, you have been given the privilege of carrying the baton of leadership in a very special relay race. If you do a great job of carrying this baton, your organization may last long beyond your tenure. You have been given this extraordinary baton for only a short segment of your organization’s life. At some point in time, you will need to hand it off.

Unlike a relay race in the Olympics, your relay has some very different rules. To begin with, if your organization continues to prosper, a series of baton carriers can help keep your company running for years and years! Rather than having a xed amount of distance to carry the baton, you may have an indeterminate amount of time. Unlike in the Olympics, you may be given a large say in determining when the handoff will occur—and you may help determine who the new baton carrier will be.

In your relay, your team’s competitors never stop. While some of your competitors may stumble and disappear from the race, others may leap from the stands and start running—at any time! While looking ahead at the track in front of you, you have to simultaneously look in all directions for future competitors.

In this race, you need to balance two priorities that often, if not usually, conict with each other. On one hand, you need to produce short-term, quarterly results. While analysts
may forgive a few bad quarters, if you have too many missteps, you will quickly be out of the race. You need to win as many quarters as you can. On the other hand, you need to do what is in the best long-term interest of your organization. If you don’t do what is right for the organization in the long term, your company will eventually be out of the race— and you will have failed in your responsibility as its baton carrier.

One positive aspect of your role as a CEO is that while carrying the baton of leadership, you can begin to prepare your successor for the handoff. In a relay race, in preparing for the handoff, one runner has to speed up while the other has to slow down. You can help ensure that your successor is up to speed as you begin to slow down to hand over the baton.

In the Olympic relays, a large audience is watching. They cheer as the handoff is made. Each new baton carrier brings new hope. If their team is behind, the crowd hopes that the new runner will close the gap. If their team is ahead, they hope that the new runner will expand the lead.

As you carry the baton of CEO leadership, a varied audience is watching your every stride. The members of your audience care even more about your performance than the people in the stands care about the performance of Olympic athletes. Stockholders are frantically “checking your time” to make sure that they are getting a return on their invested dollars— and wondering if you can keep delivering. Analysts are counting to make sure that you are meeting commitments—and pondering your chances for success in the next lap of the race. Customers are watching to make sure that you deliver value—and wondering what you have in store for them in the future.

Employees are critically reviewing your actions to make sure that your deeds match your words—and considering if your leadership will keep your organization their career choice. Competitors are looking for signs of exhaustion—and hoping that you will fade.

After the handoff, you will quickly disappear from view. Everyone will start cheering for the next baton carrier.

What will be your legacy? If you do a great job in developing your successor, part of your legacy will be that you were a leader who took the high road and worked to ensure that your organization would become even more successful after your departure. You will be viewed as a leader who helped ensure that the values of the organization lived on after you were no longer there.

As you carry the CEO baton, you need to get ready for your own departure. You need to get ready for succession. You may well think that this will be easy. You will be wrong. It is almost always tougher than you can imagine.

It is easy to fall in love with the baton of leadership. Whenever this happens, it is almost impossible to let it go.

Passing the baton is the nal challenge of great leadership. If you do it poorly, or even drop the baton, you may do grave damage to your organization.

Are you ready for succession?

The answer to this question can be a key factor in determining your organization’s success after you leave!



Excerpted from Succession: Are You Ready? Memo to the CEO, Copyright 2009.

Marshall Goldsmith is a world authority in helping successful leaders achieve positive, measurable change in behavior: for themselves, their people and their teams. His book What Got You Here Won't Get You There,won the Harold Longman Award for best business book of 2007. Marshall invites you to visit his library (MarshallGoldsmithLibrary.com) for articles and resources you can use.