I have a number of rules of thumb I’ve developed over the 20 or so years I’ve worked with business owners and leaders. Here’s a few:

• Rule of 43: The most common age for people to leave employment and head out on their own is 43.  If you want to know what drives that, leave a comment and I’ll write about it next time. Something about what you see when you look up…

• Fail fast: A business owner’s first GM is 60% likely to fail and leave within 12 months

• Rule of 2:  It takes 2 people to replace an owner because they have built up a vast domain expertise across the business that can’t be replicated in a single person

The rule of 2 is what I want to focus on here, because it doesn’t just apply to business owners, it applies to all organisations where there are people who’ve been in roles for a long time.  Whether they’re readying for retirement or still some years away from leaving, it’s really important to create bench depth behind them for the following reasons:

• Risk management.  Aging is not good for your health.

• They know too much (and I’m not talking about where the bodies are buried!). Sometimes people who’ve been successful in a certain track rely too much on their “crystallised” knowledge, and not enough on fluid knowledge that they get from learning. For more, see “Your professional decline is coming (much) sooner than you think”

• They could be adding more value to the business by building on their crystallised knowledge, spending more time exploring the future and how the organisation can build competitive advantage

• Transferring some of their knowledge and responsibility creates a learning path for people who may or may not succeed them, but will bring different perspectives and potential improvements to the role

The challenge is that a lot of the knowledge is informal takes the form of intuition. Intuition literally means “inner teaching” or what we teach ourselves. It’s not innate or some spooky sixth sense, it’s insight developed with experience and reflection, repeated many times.  Elsewhere I’ve called it “scallop eyes”, and the challenge of successful succession is how to transfer that intuition to new people ahead of them developing it themselves naturally (and they will, but it takes a long time).

It comes down to the willingness of the knowledge holders to be very specific about how they pass on knowledge. First, identify who the recipients of your knowledge ought to be (it could well be more than one).  Second, always bring a colleague to important meetings so that they can observe you in action.  Afterwards, invite observations and questions.

Third, and this is perhaps the most difficult.  Try to articulate how and why you translate “weak signals” into an intuition.  Malcolm Gladwell wrote about this in Blink, the ability to translate clues and faint hints into a judgement.  A construction company leader talked about being able to look at photos of the various construction sites, zero in on something relatively innocuous like an unsecured covering or some signage missing, and then ask his GM how the project was going.  Seven times out of ten, his follow-up questions revealed a problem that wasn’t apparent to his GM. 

What he has to do now is get practiced at explaining the connections between an unsecured covering and what that might mean.  To do that he has to slow down and uncover a train of thought that is so quick that a lot of the connections and links are obscure and sometimes downright illogical.  Doesn’t matter.  Intuition isn’t always logical. 

After all, mistakes and problems shouldn’t logically happen, but they do.  Wisdom always allows for the failure of logic.