Déjà vu?
When the GFC hit (2007 – 2009), the succession plans of many family businesses came to an abrupt halt as legions of outgoing leaders suddenly re-cast themselves into the roles of business heroes and saviours – ostensibly because they’d lived through, and survived, previous recessions and financial crises. In their minds their successors hadn’t been toughened in those fires … and the business had to be saved.
Suddenly, at least in their heads, they were needed and relevant again. This was sun breaking through clouds for former leaders who’d just managed to intellectually reconcile themselves to moving onto the next phases of their lives, to make space for a rising generation of willing successors.
The problem was, they got “it” (ie: the need for succession) cerebrally, especially after seeing a few mates dropping off the perch before they’d had time to enjoy the fruits of a life of labour. But emotionally, they’d never really accepted that it was time for them to go, even if it was clear to everybody else that they were well past their useful “use by” dates as business leaders.
Everybody else recognised that it was time to celebrate past achievements and move on – seeing the past as a basis for the future, and understanding that to have a successful future they needed to refresh the business through a well-planned succession process.
So the old leaders’ heads weren’t in sync with their hearts and, although they didn’t know it, and few had consciously willed it, many of them were just waiting for a good enough reason to bounce back in to save the day. Their self-images were so tied up with their businesses they’d felt a quite lost being, and even contemplating being, outside it.
And that’s not entirely silly. When experience begets wisdom, any business would be foolish to turn its back on an offer of help that could improve its prospects of surviving the coming years of challenge. But that’s all it should be – an offer to help, directed by the new business leaders towards strategic and governance inputs.
This should not be confused with Permitted Operational Interference. Crashing the business into reverse gear is likely to have as happy an outcome as doing the same in your car at freeway speeds (on an unclogged freeway, of course). Everybody in the business should have moved on, and the last thing anybody needs in a crisis is confusion at the front.
Of course, if experience has not begat wisdom, there’s even more reason to avoid having the former leader parachute back in. Old habits die hard, and a leader of 40 years exerts a strong magnetic pull on staff who’ve seen them as the boss since forever. Their very presence is destabilising to the new chain of command (the very opposite of what they want to achieve – one hopes!) and if they lack the wisdom to know how to deal with the situation, they will cause far more harm than good.