manage the seat before it empties?
“The cancer is back”
… said by a good friend, in the season where we were working 140 hours a week. Welcome to the Real World… Succession as a battlefield promotion. Look at your org chart and find the box that would hurt most if the person in it stepped out today… You know which one it is. You knew before you looked. Now tell me the name of the person who would sit there tomorrow morning, and tell me whether they have any idea that is your plan…
That gap, between the box you fear and the name you have not got, is where most of the work of a career quietly goes wrong.
…the chair nobody managed to think about until it was empty…
Adam Gaynor played rhythm guitar from the start in 1995. He played on the debut, and on the 2 records that followed it, through the whole run that sold the band into every house in America. Then he left. Nobody agrees whether it was 2004 or 2005, no public reason was ever given, and the seat simply sat there empty. That is what a real departure looks like: not a crisis, not a scandal, just a chair on the left of the stage with nobody in it and a tour to play.
…and the man who took the seat was already in the room…
They did not go outside to fill it. Paul Doucette got up from behind the drums and moved to rhythm guitar, and he has stayed there ever since. A touring drummer came in behind him. The band handled its own Succession out of its own ranks, because somebody in that room could already do 2 jobs.
The song is the other half of the same thought. Real World has Thomas running through lives he did not live, wondering out loud whether any of them would have come out better or worse than the one he got. Everybody in that band had a version of that question the day Gaynor left.
A seat only you can sit in is a single point of failure…
What your calendar already knows about your Successor…
Your calendar is the most honest Succession document you own… IF you read it that way. Count every recurring meeting that only you can attend. That is a seat nobody else can sit in, not because they lack the skill. Because they have never been in the room … If the number is higher than 3, you are a bottleneck by design, and the design is yours.
Which seat can you not manage your way out of?
The honest answer is usually the one you enjoy most. That is the seat you defend, the meeting you would never delegate, the decision you take back at the last minute because it is faster. Nobody grows underneath a leader who keeps the good chair.
None of us had any capacity… And… we were forced to make it happen. We had to depend on our own directs more, so we could divide that load among his peers. Honestly, we all learned that even with everyone at red line, we could delegate even more. AND, those leaders told us that they couldn’t take it on… and then we all stopped doing it. Fun when your directs are better at saying no than you are😉
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: open next month’s calendar and put a mark against every meeting only you can attend. The marks are your list.
Reading a Calendar back to a leader as a Risk Register is one of the more useful hours I spend. Schedule time with me here.
Mark next month, then find out what your team could do in the… Real World
