How to measure leadership effectiveness: The succession test

Are you a manager of managers? If so, here’s the ultimate test of your effectiveness…

If you left your role, would the group continue successfully without you?

Because our job isn’t to merely get the machine running well, it’s to build the machine in such a way that it continues to run well long after we move on.

Here’s an example from my own career… in the last long-term executive role I had, employee engagement was increasing despite an organisational downward trend. While corporate results kept going down, our group went from having poor engagement to being in the top 10 per cent for the country.

I was very happy about this. I was pleased that we’d created a working environment that promoted high levels of both job satisfaction and performance. Things weren’t perfect, but people were broadly happy and doing great work.

And, of course – I personally felt a great sense of achievement in this. It made me happy to know that people were enjoying themselves and getting better at what they did.

When I left the organisation (to start Impact Society 🎉), the trend in that group reversed and employee engagement tanked over the following years. And this was despite most of the middle management that I’d worked with remaining in place.

A more egotistical version of me might have concluded that this proved how good I was at my job – “see, once I leave, everything goes to shit!”.

But the inconvenient reality was that it probably meant I’d failed to build a system of management – particularly within middle management – that could sustain itself despite personnel changes.

Of course, whoever takes over from us can have an enormous effect on what happens next – they can dismantle the systems we built. And sometimes we do build a great machine only for the next person to take it apart.

There was probably a bit of that here, but I think the bigger lesson is that I hadn’t embedded the system of management well enough within the middle managers so that they could continue running their teams effectively without oversight. Because, even if they should, many executive managers fail to take much interest in the day-to-day workings of their subordinate teams, so whatever systems are embedded at that level can often continue despite the change in executive management.

So, in hindsight, I should have spent more time with individual managers helping them iterate the system of work within their teams. This is an example of what building the machine looks like.

This isn’t easy – it’s like trying to change the tyres on a car while you’re driving it, but it’s important. And it is *the* test of managerial effectiveness.

Because, of all the executive managers in the world, only some manage to get their group running really well. But even fewer get it running well within such a robust system of management that its performance no longer depends on any one person or set of people. And that’s what we should be aiming for.

Would your team keep running without you?

Building a system of management that outlasts you is slow work, and most of it happens one manager at a time. Coaching gives you an hour by video with someone who’s run teams and organisations, spent on one of your managers: what you keep stepping in to fix, what they’d need to run their team without you watching and how to hand it back without it falling over. Your first session is free. You spend less time holding things together and leave behind something that keeps working once you’ve gone