Elastic Leadership – Rethinking CEO Succession as a System-Wide Resilience Strategy
May 15, 2025
Stability is seductive. A high-performing CEO, a well-aligned culture, and clear momentum can signal strength. Yet periods of apparent stability can conceal the greatest vulnerabilities. What appears as steadiness may obscure an incomplete understanding of how interdependent elements of the organization interact to sustain performance—and a tendency to rely on the CEO as the implicit integrator of that complexity.
Succession, at its best, is not just about naming a successor. It’s about stress-testing the leadership system: Can it stretch without breaking? Can it absorb disruption without losing direction? Can it evolve fast enough to meet, if not define, the future?
Succession can be viewed as an event—a change in the seat. But the most effective boards and CEOs treat it as an ongoing, layered practice of understanding leadership strengths and gaps and how they align with the future demands of the business, talent, product, market, and technology landscape.
Succession Planning Versus Succession Readiness
Many boards have a succession plan on paper. Names have been discussed. Interim scenarios have been rehearsed and outlined. On the surface, it can feel like the essentials are in place.
But there’s a difference between having a plan and being truly ready for a transition.
Succession readiness asks:
- How dependent is our strategy, investor confidence, and internal trust on the current CEO’s capabilities?
- How distributed is decision-making credibility (authority and trust) across the executive team?
- Do we have clarity not just on the next person but also on the context they’d be stepping into and what would need to shift around them?
Plans name successors. Readiness builds organizational elasticity.
A board may have full confidence in the CEO and still ask not only who would step in tomorrow but also whether we’ve truly understood and built for the complexity that sits beneath the CEO—the relationships, decisions, and interdependencies that need to function regardless of who is in the seat.
Succession as a System Test
Succession planning, when approached as a strategic discipline, becomes a lever for institutional resilience—both in individuals and across the broader organizational ecosystem.
More than just preparing someone to take the helm, it’s about reinforcing continuity, creating strategic options, and building leadership capacity in a way that flexes with future needs. Done well, it reveals where leadership is too concentrated and where capabilities need to be cultivated.
Boards that embrace this approach invest in two critical layers:
1. The Individual Layer
Readiness at the individual level requires more than identifying a potential successor. It’s about taking a deliberate and forward-looking view of what the role will demand next. It means:
- Defining what leadership needs to look like for the next era.
- Ensuring internal candidates gain meaningful exposure, stretch, and coaching.
- Avoiding the trap of setting a successor up to fill the shoes of a legend.
- Asking what capabilities will be most critical in the next iteration of the business—across strategy, innovation, capital markets, and organizational complexity.
- Exploring whether current candidates are equipped to not only maintain but also evolve the business model, especially under changing conditions.
2. The System Layer
Succession planning is also a chance to test and strengthen the broader leadership architecture:
- Which strategic priorities or relationships could stall—or collapse—without the current CEO’s direct involvement?
- Where is authority informal or fragile, and how might that surface during a leadership transition?
- Are there succession plans in place for other enterprise-critical roles?
- How well are we cultivating readiness in areas like product, technology, risk, and operations?
- Do we have visibility into where institutional knowledge resides—and a strategy for transferring it?
This proactively builds in the leadership elasticity needed not just to navigate the unexpected but also absorb disruption, mitigate risk, and emerge stronger on the other side.
The Real Test
Especially in today’s climate of uncertainty, we must expect the unexpected. If we are not attentive to the right details, what looks like stability can obscure fragile interdependencies and concentrated enterprise risk. Succession planning is one of the strongest strategic levers to embed resilience. Approached as a system-wide discipline, it enhances adaptability, preserves institutional continuity, and positions the organization to thrive through leadership transitions. It’s a strong investment in both the individual who will take the helm and the organization’s capacity to resiliently lead through disruption, navigate complexity, and adapt in ways that protect momentum and enable growth.
Let’s Talk
RHR has partnered with thousands of CEOs and boards as they strive to elevate the performance of their teams and companies. We understand the challenges and opportunities that confront those at the top of the house, and we offer public and private companies across industries worldwide a full suite of board and CEO advisory services. As a respected and trusted advisor, we excel at transforming ambiguity into opportunity to help evolve leadership and governance for enduring success on today’s global stage.
To learn more, reach out to Robert Abramo, head of business development.
Julie Locke is a partner at RHR with over two decades of experience advising founders and executive leaders in high-impact, high-stakes environments. She works across a range of industries and sectors, including capital investment (venture capital and private equity), technology, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, consumer packaged goods, and nonprofits.
Julie coaches founders and CEOs as they scale their leadership during periods of rapid growth and collaborates with boards focused on achieving governance excellence.
