It looks like leadership to name your successor early and say it out loud. It signals confidence, rewards a favorite, and reassures a nervous board that the future is handled. The chosen one gets the visible assignments, the platform, the presumption. Everyone now knows who is next.
That clarity is exactly the trap. A public, early anointment does three things that quietly damage the organization, and all three are hard to undo once the words are out.
What the coronation does
First, it freezes the field. Other capable people, reading the signal correctly, conclude the race is over and either stop competing or leave. The organization loses its bench precisely when it should be deepening it. Zhang and Rajagopalan's study of 204 successions found that the probability of a prepared relay succession actually falls when there are more internal candidates, which points to a real tension: organizations tend to commit to one heir rather than cultivate several. The convenience of a single name comes at the cost of the alternatives.
Second, it distorts behavior. Once someone is the anointed heir, honest feedback about them dries up. Colleagues manage upward toward the presumed future boss. The incumbent, having staked their judgment publicly, becomes invested in the choice being right and grows reluctant to see the evidence that it is not. The heir stops being evaluated and starts being ratified.
Third, it makes reversal expensive. If the anointed successor turns out to be wrong, unfit, unready, or simply not what the next era needs, undoing the coronation is a public humiliation for everyone involved. So organizations often go through with a bad handover rather than absorb the embarrassment of reversing a decision they announced too soon.
Preparation is not coronation
The confusion at the heart of the trap is between preparing a successor and crowning one. The evidence strongly favors preparation. Relay successions, where an heir is genuinely developed before taking over, produced the best post-succession performance in Zhang and Rajagopalan's data, especially when conditions were hard. But preparation can be done for two or three people at once, quietly, as development rather than as a declared line of succession. Coronation is preparation collapsed to a single public bet, made early, when the least information is available.
The romance of leadership compounds the risk. Meindl and colleagues showed that people over-attribute an organization's results to its leader, and that the same executive is judged more charismatic when the firm does well. An anointed heir riding a good period gets credited with a brilliance the numbers, not the person, produced, and the coronation hardens around an illusion. When the cycle turns, the same person looks suddenly inadequate, and the organization mistakes a change in fortune for a change in the successor.
Develop many, name one late
The way out is not to avoid preparing successors, it is to separate development from announcement. Develop several people seriously, give them real and testing assignments, let them be evaluated honestly because none of them is yet the untouchable heir. Keep the decision open long enough to see how each performs under weight, and make the naming late, when the evidence is richest and the runway to the actual handover is short.
There is a narrower case where early naming is defensible, and it is worth stating so the argument is not mistaken for a blanket rule. When continuity itself is the reassurance the situation demands, an anxious market, a fragile customer base, a board that needs to signal stability, a visible heir can be a genuine asset, and Schepker's finding that internal continuity suits healthy firms supports leaning that way. Even then, the naming works only if the heir was actually prepared, not merely announced. The trap is not naming a successor, it is naming one early and publicly in place of the years of development that make the name mean anything.
Naming early and loudly buys a feeling of control in exchange for the organization's flexibility, its bench, and its ability to change its mind. The confident move is not to crown the future the moment you can, it is to keep developing options and to name a successor only when you must. The heir apparent trap is sprung the day you say the name, and it stays sprung until the handover, for better or, more often than boards expect, for worse.
Sources
- Zhang & Rajagopalan (2004). When the Known Devil Is Better Than an Unknown God: Relay CEO Successions. In 204 successions, relay (a designated, prepared heir) produced better post-succession performance, especially when prior performance was weak and later instability high. https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/20159598
- 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