Succession plans account for the strategy, the timeline, the successor, the announcement. They almost never account for the fact that the person leaving is losing something close to a self. For a leader who has spent decades as the one in charge, the title was not just a job, it was an identity, a source of purpose, status, and daily meaning. Stepping down is not only a career transition. It is a small death, and it is grieved like one.
Because nobody plans for the grief, it shows up unplanned, and it does damage. The retiring leader who cannot let go, who keeps calling the office, who undermines the successor, who finds reasons the timeline should slip, is often not power-hungry. They are grieving, and the grief has nowhere sanctioned to go, so it leaks into sabotage.
The identity was partly an illusion
Part of what makes the loss so sharp is a distortion that flattered the leader for years. Meindl and colleagues named it the romance of leadership: people over-attribute an organization's results to its leader, and the same executive is rated more charismatic when the company is doing well. For a long-serving leader, this means years of being told, implicitly and explicitly, that they are the reason it works. That message builds an identity in which the person and the institution's success are the same thing.
When the moment comes to leave, that fused identity makes departure feel like erasure. If I was the reason it worked, then leaving is not retirement, it is the removal of the thing that made it work, and the removal of the self that was defined by making it work. The grief is proportional to how completely the person believed the attribution. The leaders who struggle most to leave are often the ones who most fully absorbed the story that they were indispensable.
Semler's version of the crisis
Ricardo Semler's collapse at twenty-five is usually told as a story about overwork, but it is also a story about identity. Told by a doctor that he was the healthiest sick person the doctor had ever seen, that nothing was wrong except how he was living, he was confronting the cost of a life organized entirely around the company. His response was to build a life, and a self, that did not depend on being the man in charge of everything, including, later, a way of buying back time to do the things people usually defer to old age. The lesson underneath is that a leader who has an identity beyond the role can let go of the role. A leader who is nothing but the role cannot.
Planning for the grief
Treating the outgoing leader's grief as a real part of succession is not sentimentality, it is risk management. The unaddressed grief is what makes handovers slip, successors get undermined, and clean transitions turn messy. A succession plan that ignores it is planning around a predictable hazard as if it were not there.
Addressing it means a few practical things. It means giving the departing leader a next chapter to move toward, a purpose that is theirs and not a shadow of the old role, so that leaving is a move to something rather than only a loss of something. It means a clean break rather than a lingering, ambiguous presence that lets the grief express itself as interference. And it means letting the leader be honest, with themselves and a few trusted others, that this is hard, rather than performing a serenity that then curdles into resentment.
The grief is not only the outgoing leader's to carry, either, and boards mishandle this by treating it as a private matter. An organization that has attributed its success to one person for years grieves too, and its anxiety can pull the departed leader back in, the calls asking for their read on a decision, the deference that undercuts the successor. A clean handover protects both sides from that pull. It gives the organization no choice but to trust the successor, and it gives the outgoing leader no excuse to keep proving they matter. The kindness of a clean break is that it forecloses the slow, mutual sabotage that ambiguity invites.
The most generous act of a leader's tenure is often the last one: to leave well, to let the successor own the role fully, to resist the pull to prove they are still needed. That generosity is only possible for someone who has an identity to return to when the corner office is gone. Building that identity is not a personal indulgence to be handled off to the side. It is part of the succession, and the part most likely to be fatal if it is skipped.
Sources
- Meindl, Ehrlich & Dukerich (1985). The Romance of Leadership. People over-attribute organizational outcomes to the leader; the same executive is judged more charismatic when the firm does well. https://doi.org/10.2307/2392813
- Schepker, Kim, Patel, Thatcher & Campion (2017). CEO Succession, Strategic Change, and Post-Succession Performance: A Meta-Analysis. Across 60 samples and 13,578 successions, a change of CEO hurts short-term performance and has no significant direct long-term effect; internal successors give continuity, external ones bring more strategic change. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2017.03.001