When I was 18 years old, I joined a local youth mentorship program as a volunteer leader/mentor. I had held leadership positions before, even been paid for them, but this was a new type of leadership for me. Not only was I in a leadership position — albeit a junior leadership role — I was also in a position of mentorship.
In previous leadership roles, I would lead a group of peers to complete a certain task. In this position, my job was to mentor and cultivate young leaders.
Your job as a leader is to replace yourself
When I first started in this role, I had a sit-down meeting with my supervisor who ran the program. In that meeting, he told me something that I will never forget. “Kyle,” he said, “your job as a leader is to replace yourself.” It took me three years to figure out what that meant and why it was the best advice anyone had ever given me..
As a new leader, I didn’t want to be replaced. After all, I had worked hard to get to where I was and I liked my position. I worked with high school students and got to play games and goof off. I had just the right amount of responsibility: enough to be a part of the leadership team but not enough to have to worry about anything particularly difficult. I had a good gig and didn’t want to lose it. But then I grew as a leader.
Leaders should never be stagnant
Leaders should never be stagnant — perhaps the topic of a future post.
The day you stop developing as a leader is the day you should consider changing positions.
Over the next couple of years I developed and matured as a leader and I became ready for more responsibility and for a new and exciting role in the program. Not only was I ready to move up, but our program went through a two-year period of high attrition where we lost most of our long-term, senior leaders. In three years I went from being a rookie junior leader to one of the longest-serving leaders.
It was time for me to move to a more senior position inside the organization, but to do that I had to replace myself. Luckily, thanks to the advice and counsel of my supervisor and mentor, I had been mentoring other people to become leaders, and there were people ready and willing to step into my role. The transition from one position to the next was made that much simpler by the fact that I had someone ready to step into my role.
Do not let an opportunity pass you by because you failed to create a succession plan
You may be thinking that you will not be getting a promotion any time soon, so why bother mentoring someone to take over your position? That’s a good question. The answer lies in organizational growth.
When your organization grows, your organizational need for leaders will also grow. Maybe that person you are mentoring is not going to replace you; maybe there will be a new position that is created that needs to be filled and you have already mentored this person to take on the leadership responsibilities of that role.
On the other hand, as an organization grows, maybe there will be a new position created for you and even though you are not being promoted, you still need someone to take over the role you held previously.
The point of replacing yourself is to be ready for organizational change. You never know when an opportunity will arise, and if you are not ready to grow not only as an organization but as an individual, you can miss the opportunity. Do not let an opportunity pass you by because you failed to create a succession plan.
No room for insecurity
There is an instinctive fear within human beings of being replaced. It is the classic dictator mentality: if someone else becomes too powerful, they might depose me. This is why some leaders choose to not groom their own replacements.
This mentality will stifle the growth of your organization and will turn you into an ineffective leader. If you are worried about someone replacing you, you should focus on making yourself better, not on making everyone else worse.
There is no room for insecurity in leadership.
You are paralyzing your team if you do not mentor your team members to be the best leaders that they can be. Edwin Catmull, head of Pixar Studios, wrote in his book, Creativity Inc. (co-authored by Amy Wallace), that he promotes independence, leadership, and responsibility among all of his staff. He empowers his staff to fix issues as they come up rather than have to go through an approval process. Leaders empower others.
A strong leader should always be looking for someone to replace them.
Such a mentality profits the organization as a whole. Your protege will bring new ideas to the table that you never would have considered; their experience will provide a new lens that could benefit everyone. Even if your protege does not end up replacing you, by involving them in the leadership process, you open yourself up to the influence of their creativity. This addition to your vision is invaluable.
So, if you are insecure about your position in your organization and are worried that if you begin mentoring someone that they may replace you, it is time to take a gut check.
Your insecurity is paralyzing your organization and you need to start empowering the people you work with rather than compete with them.
Dynamic lessons
Stagnancy not only kills leaders, it kills organizations. You should always be looking for people who can replace you so that you can move forward to bigger and better things. If you fail to create a succession plan, you may miss out on an opportunity simply because you can’t afford to pass the torch on to someone else.
If you are insecure about your position and find yourself competing with your team rather than empowering them, you have a problem. While healthy competition is good for an organization, leaders should be focused on the future, not on maintaining the present.
Have you ever made a succession plan or been involved in such a plan? How did it work? What worked well for you? What didn’t work?
