The Successor Nobody Mentioned

Most boards can name the person who would step up. Far fewer have ever told them.

At the end of last month, Princes Group announced that its chief executive, Simon Harrison, was stepping down after two years in the seat to pursue a new opportunity. By the following morning the business had an answer of sorts. Giuseppe Mastrolia, the chief commercial officer, would run the company as interim chief executive while a formal search for a permanent successor got under way.

As these announcements go, it was orderly. 

Princes had a heavyweight to hand, a man who had led a major European food group for the better part of a decade before the two businesses combined. 

The ship is steady. 

Princes will be fine.

What interests me is two words buried in the statement: interim, and search.

Because in businesses far less prepared, those two words usually mean the same thing. The board had a name. 

It did not have a plan.

The question every board can answer, and the three it cannot

Ask any board who would step up if the chief executive resigned tomorrow, and a name arrives within seconds. I have been asking that question across the table for twenty-five years, and I can count on one hand the boards that hesitated.

Then ask three more.

Does that person know? 

When did you last test them, properly, with something real at stake? 

And, who is the second name, behind them?

The room goes quiet.

We have learned to treat the first question as succession planning. It is nothing of the sort. 

A name in a nine-box grid, reviewed once a year and shared with nobody, least of all the person it belongs to, is not a plan. It is an assumption that has never been asked to prove itself.

What the numbers say about all those names

A recent study of UK retail leadership recorded forty permanent chief executive changes in 2025, close to double the year before. 

The churn itself is not news. 

I wrote about that revolving door last spring. 

The figure that deserves far more attention sits underneath it.

Only 37% of those appointments went to internal candidates.

Think about what that means. Nearly every one of those boards, at some point, had a succession slide with a name on it. When the moment actually arrived, almost two thirds went outside anyway. Some of those searches were a deliberate choice to buy a different capability, and that can be exactly right. But a good number, in my experience, were something else entirely: the moment a board discovers the difference between having a name and having a candidate. The name had never been told. Never been stretched. Never stood in front of the board and owned a decision that mattered. So when the vacancy was real, the board looked at its own paperwork and did not believe it.

The same study found that 62% of the new appointments were first-time chief executives. 

Whichever route a board takes, in other words, someone ends up learning the hardest job in the business from a standing start. The only real question is whether you prepared them for it while you still had the chance. Worth taking a look at my last article “Nobody trains you for the top”.

Why the name never gets told

When I put this to chairs, the same two objections come back.

The first: “if we tell them and later choose someone else, we will lose them.” 

Perhaps. But look hard at what you are doing instead. You are relying on their ignorance to retain them. And ambitious people are never ignorant about their own prospects for long. In the absence of a conversation they make their own assessment, and they make it with the help of people who do my job. The silence a board maintains so carefully is being filled by other people's phone calls.

The second: “naming a successor creates entitlement and unsettles the rest of the team.” 

Also possible, if it is handled as a coronation. But a succession conversation is not a promise. Done properly it is a development contract. Here is what the next role demands. Here is the gap between that and where you are today. Here is the mandate we are giving you to close it, and here is the honest truth that the board may still run a process when the day comes. Strong people do not walk away from that conversation.

They walk away from the absence of it.

The call that comes too late

A few years ago I watched a retail business lose its chief financial officer with almost no warning. The board stayed calm, at first. Everyone knew the deputy was the natural successor. His name had sat in the succession file for two years. The chair invited him in, made the offer, and sat back.

The deputy listened politely, thanked him, and explained that he had accepted a group finance director role at another business ten days earlier. He had been interviewing for six months.

What stayed with me was what he said on his way out. In two years, nobody had ever mentioned it to him. 

He assumed the plan was somebody else.

The board had a plan. 

He was in it. 

But nobody had told him, so as far as he was concerned there was no plan, and he quietly built one of his own. I see versions of this constantly, and they rarely look like a resignation crisis. They look like the slow, unexplained leak of exactly the people the spreadsheet silently depends on.

The leaders I know who handle this well do one other thing. 

They do not wrestle with it alone. 

They test the plan, and their own reluctance to have the conversation, with peers outside the business, people with no stake in the outcome and no reason to soften the answer. It is remarkable how quickly "we will tell her when the time is right" collapses under one honest question from a fellow owner.

Five questions for your next board meeting

If your organisation has a chief executive, a founder, or any leader whose sudden exit would make Monday morning difficult, these are worth an honest answer.

1. If the resignation letter arrived today, whose name would we put to the board by Friday? Say it out loud. If two directors give different names, that is your first finding.

   
   

2. Does that person know? If not, what do we imagine their silence is telling them?

   
   

3. When did we last test them with something real: a turnaround, a board paper delivered in their own name, a mandate that could visibly fail?

   
   

4. Who is the second name? A plan with one name in it is one resignation away from being no plan at all.

   
   

5. If we ended up running an external search, would it be because we chose to compare, or because we had no choice? Only one of those is a decision.

Closing thought

Succession is one of the few certainties a board is granted. Every leader leaves. The date is unknown. 

The event is not.

And yet the most common succession plan in British business is still a name that has never been spoken to its owner.

Have the conversation. Test the name. Build the second one. Because the successor nobody mentioned has a habit of becoming the successor nobody got.

I would be very interested to read your thoughts, in the comments or in a direct message. Were you ever told you were the name in the plan, or did you find out when it no longer mattered?

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Maarten Jonckers is the Managing Director of Nicholas Alexander Executive Search, a boutique firm specialising in senior leadership appointments across retail and consumer. He also facilitates peer-advisory boards for business owners through The Alternative Board.