CEO Succession: The Decision Nobody Makes Alone
A CEO has been leading a company for 10+ years.
Under her leadership, the business has grown significantly. The management team is strong. The board knows that succession should now be discussed.
Everyone agrees. In principle.
A succession committee is created. Profiles are reviewed. Internal candidates are assessed. External search firms are consulted.
And yet, months later, the process has barely moved.
One internal candidate is considered excellent — but “perhaps not quite ready.”
Another has the experience — but “may not have the right leadership style.”
An external candidate looks compelling — but “doesn’t really understand the culture.”
The CEO herself supports the process. She says the right things. She knows succession is necessary.
But every time the conversation approaches an actual decision, another reason appears to wait.
More information is needed.
Another candidate should be considered.
The timing is not ideal.
The market is uncertain.
A major transaction may be coming.
Nothing is explicitly blocked.
And yet, somehow, nothing moves.
Because CEO succession is rarely only about selecting the next CEO.
It is also about what happens to everyone else when the CEO changes.
The apparent problem
On paper, CEO succession looks like a governance process.
The board must identify the leadership capabilities the company will need in its next phase.
Internal talent must be assessed.
External candidates may need to be considered.
Timing must be determined.
Responsibilities between the CEO, the chair, the nomination committee and the board must be clear.
These are real questions.
And good succession planning matters enormously.
A poorly prepared transition can destabilise an organisation, unsettle investors, trigger departures among senior executives and destroy value.
So boards quite rightly devote considerable attention to process.
They build succession plans.
They benchmark candidates.
They create competency matrices.
They conduct assessments.
They debate internal versus external appointments.
All of this is necessary.
But sometimes, even an impeccably designed process does not produce a decision.
The same candidates are discussed repeatedly.
Criteria subtly change.
Timelines move.
Reservations multiply.
And a question that initially seemed straightforward — Who should lead the company next?
— begins to reveal another set of questions.
What exactly are we asking the current CEO to give up?
What will change for the board when someone new takes the role?
Who gains influence — and who loses it?
What happens to those who expected to be chosen?
And perhaps, beneath all of them:
Are we really ready for this company to enter a chapter that will no longer belong to its current leader?
What is actually happening
Leadership succession is unusual because the person whose replacement is being discussed is often still fully in power.
The CEO may still be performing well.
Employees may still look to them for direction.
Investors may associate the company with them.
Board members may have worked alongside them for years.
Senior executives may have built their careers under their leadership.
And the organisation itself may have developed around their personality, decisions and authority.
Succession therefore creates a peculiar situation.
Everyone is asked to prepare for a future in which the current leader is no longer at the centre — while continuing to behave as though that leader remains fully at the centre today.
This creates ambiguity.
The board must plan beyond the CEO while continuing to support the CEO.
Potential successors must demonstrate ambition without appearing disloyal.
The CEO must help prepare someone else to occupy a position that may have become deeply connected to their identity.
Senior executives must imagine a different hierarchy without knowing whether they will have a place in it.
Everyone is discussing the future.
But everyone is also negotiating their position within that future.
The human dynamics behind CEO succession
Power is one of the most visible dimensions of succession.
But it is rarely the only one.
Leadership roles accumulate meaning over time.
For a long-serving CEO, the role may represent achievement, recognition, belonging, authority, purpose and identity.
Leaving it is therefore not simply a professional transition.
It can raise a much more personal question: Who am I when I am no longer the person everyone turns to?
This question does not require a CEO to be narcissistic or unwilling to leave.
It is simply difficult to separate a person entirely from a role they may have inhabited for ten, fifteen or twenty years.
The organisation can experience something similar.
People become accustomed not only to what a leader does, but to the psychological function that leader performs.
Perhaps the CEO reassures.
Perhaps they decide.
Perhaps they absorb conflict.
Perhaps they embody the company's ambition.
Perhaps they are the person who ultimately carries responsibility when things go wrong.
Replacing a CEO therefore means more than transferring responsibilities.
It changes a system of relationships.
And systems often resist change even when everyone consciously agrees that change is necessary.
The paradox of the successor
Potential successors face their own contradiction.
To become credible candidates, they must demonstrate leadership, autonomy and ambition.
But too much ambition can be interpreted as impatience.
Too much autonomy can look like disloyalty.
Too much visibility can feel threatening.
Too little, however, can confirm that they are “not quite ready.”
The candidate is therefore placed in a difficult position: Show us that you are ready to replace the CEO — without behaving as though you want to replace the CEO.
This paradox can persist for years.
A highly capable executive may repeatedly be told that one more experience is needed.
A larger P&L.
International exposure.
More board experience.
More time with investors.
A different leadership style.
Sometimes these requirements are entirely legitimate.
But sometimes “not yet” becomes a way of postponing a decision whose implications feel difficult to confront.
And the successor can become trapped in permanent preparation for a role that never quite becomes available.
The board is not neutral either
It is tempting to imagine the board as the objective decision-maker standing outside these dynamics.
It rarely is.
Board members have relationships with the CEO.
Some may have appointed them.
Some may have supported them through difficult periods.
Some may identify strongly with their leadership.
Others may have become frustrated with them.
The chair may have developed a particularly close working relationship with the CEO.
And different directors may have very different ideas about what kind of leader should come next.
A succession discussion can therefore become a discussion about the board itself.
What does the board want the company to become?
How much change does it really want?
Does it want continuity or transformation?
How much authority is it prepared to give the next CEO?
And does the board itself need to change for the next chapter to begin?
Sometimes the candidate debate is carrying a disagreement that the board has not yet articulated about the future of the company.
One director wants an operator.
Another wants a visionary.
One wants continuity.
Another wants disruption.
One wants someone who will work closely with the board.
Another wants a powerful, autonomous CEO.
These may look like disagreements about candidates.
But they may actually be disagreements about the company the board wants to create.
Why conventional solutions sometimes fail
The conventional response to succession uncertainty is usually to improve the process.
Define the criteria more precisely.
Start earlier.
Assess more candidates.
Strengthen the leadership pipeline.
Clarify the timetable.
Engage external advisers.
All of these measures can be valuable.
Sometimes they are exactly what is needed.
But process cannot resolve a question that has not yet been acknowledged.
A perfect competency matrix cannot answer: Is the current CEO actually ready to leave?
A broader candidate list cannot answer: Does the board genuinely agree about what the company should become?
An assessment process cannot answer: Can the organisation tolerate a leader who will do things differently?
And a succession timetable cannot answer: What role, if any, should the outgoing CEO have once the successor arrives?
When these questions remain unresolved, process can become something else.
A sophisticated way of postponing the decision.
More candidates.
More assessments.
More discussions.
More time.
The succession process continues.
The succession itself does not.
What can unlock the situation
The objective is not to psychologise every succession process.
Sometimes the problem really is insufficient preparation.
Sometimes there is no credible internal candidate.
Sometimes the business environment genuinely makes timing difficult.
Sometimes the board simply needs better information.
But when succession has been discussed for a long time without meaningful movement, it may help to separate three different questions.
1. The leadership question
What does the company genuinely need from its next CEO?
Not who looks most like the current leader.
Not who feels safest.
Not who creates the least disruption.
What capabilities, temperament and leadership style will the next chapter actually require?
2. The transition question
What must happen for authority to move from one person to another?
When does the current CEO stop deciding?
What role will they have afterwards, if any?
How will the board support the new CEO's authority?
What happens to internal candidates who are not selected?
Succession is not complete when a name is announced.
It is complete when authority has actually moved.
3. The underlying human question
What does this succession mean to the people involved?
What is the current CEO afraid of losing?
What is the board reluctant to change?
What are potential successors unable to say?
What loyalties are shaping the process?
What conflicts are being expressed through candidate selection rather than discussed directly?
And perhaps the most important question: What must the organisation be willing to let go of in order for someone new genuinely to lead?
When these questions can be discussed separately, succession becomes easier to think about.
Not necessarily easier to execute.
But clearer.
And clarity is often what has been missing.
The decision behind the decision
In CEO succession, the explicit decision is: Who should be the next CEO?
But another decision often sits behind it.
For the outgoing CEO: Am I ready to allow this organisation to continue without me at its centre?
For the board: Are we prepared to give someone new the authority to lead differently?
For an internal successor: Can I claim this role without feeling that I am betraying the person who helped me reach it?
For the organisation: Can we preserve what matters from the past without requiring the future to reproduce it?
And sometimes, behind the entire succession process: Are we choosing the next leader — or trying to avoid the loss of the previous one?
That is the decision behind the decision.
And it is why CEO succession is a decision nobody makes alone.
Because leadership may be held by one person.
But the meaning of leadership — the authority, loyalty, identity and relationships that have accumulated around it — belongs to an entire system.
A successor can be appointed in a board meeting.
For succession actually to happen, however, the organisation must do something much more difficult.
It must allow one chapter to end so that another can genuinely begin.
***
The Anatomy of a Deadlock is a five-part series exploring what happens when important business decisions stop moving — across shareholder conflicts, founder relationships, leadership succession and boardroom deadlocks.
Previous — The Anatomy of a Deadlock 02
When Co-Founders Stop Agreeing: The Dynamics Behind Founder Conflict
Next — The Anatomy of a Deadlock 04
When a Board Cannot Decide: Understanding Governance Deadlocks
About the author
Rosa Bellei combines more than twenty years of investment banking experience with advanced training in psychoanalysis and psychopathology. She is the founder of The Finance Shrink and creator of the Decision Deadlock Method™.
Rosa Bellei | The Finance Shrink | Decision Deadlock Method™
