The Leadership Practice We Undersell: Building a Line of Succession

By Kirsten Penaloza - Former CX executive, coach, and Organizational Advisor working with leaders to create kick-butt teams and healthy work cultures. 

Every leadership book speaks to strategy, vision, and results. None of the ones I’ve read mention the thing that will ensure any of those last after you move on: What I call the “line of succession.” 

It's not a formal succession plan quickly put together when you know you’re moving on, either because you got promoted and need to backfill your role, or because you found your next opportunity somewhere else. It's not just a fancy diagram with circles and lines drafted annually for your board meeting to understand your department’s annual budget. 

Line of succession is the routine of developing your people to the point where the team is in a position to live and thrive without you in the middle of all the decisions. 

And it's a much underestimated leadership practice. At least because on the surface it sounds contradictory. Why would you invest your energy into creating a potential replacement for yourself or backfill roles all the time? 

The Paradox That Isn't Really a Paradox

There's one thing that sport coaches, athletes, and apparently LinkedIn newsletter writers understand much better than corporate leaders: the strength of a team is in its bench. 

The concept really sank in for me while reading"The Best Teams Create What Comes Next" newsletter by Support Driven memberCoach Rios, because it describes the reality I’ve seen all the time in my leadership and now coaching practice. Succession is a muscle that needs to be built through delegation, stretch assignments, and radically candid growth or feedback conversations.

Coach Rios shares what happens to his team members: “Frontline experience became a pathway into other parts of the organization. That does not weaken a team. It proves the team is working.” I cannot agree more. 

And when you do it right, you create something more than career paths for your frontline agents. You create highly engaged teams, which translates to improved performance, low turnover, or higher talent retention, and foundational knowledge-sharing across the entire organization.

What It Creates for Your Team

It creates growth opportunities for your people. Not the performative development conversations about improving CSAT that go absolutely nowhere, but real expansion of their responsibility, visibility, and ownership. People don't engage because of metrics or mission statements hanging on the walls. They stay because they see where they can go. 

It goes back to the same thing I am talking about all the time in my research on mattering and belonging – people need to know that their voice influences the decision, that their perspective is valued, and that they are actually investing in their growth. Line of succession is mattering made practical. It says through actions rather than words: "I see how you can grow, and I am building the runway for you".

I talked about this specifically for CX professionals in a presentation I made on building career paths in CX (watch it here). CX roles have a reputation of being used as a starting point for your career, a foot in the door into the organization, or a pool of clueless people who don’t know what to do with all their talent. In my opinion, all of it is true, and none of it is bad. 

Because anyone who knows how to talk about your product to the actual end-user has the communication skills to translate customer needs to the different stakeholders (from Marketing to Engineering), and has the best foundation to make it in any other role within the same organization. 

Think about it: As a CX professional, what do we often wish for? That other departments would understand the work we do, would listen to clients more, would understand the client journey better, or could help out in the queue when sh!t hits the fan. If you build a line of succession where you constantly move your frontline agents or CX team members into different positions, and the company treats your department as a pool of talent to source from, you achieve exactly that! 

Does it mean that you have to continuously backfill and run hiring and onboarding processes? Yes. Is it tiring and annoying? Only if you allow it to be. 

At CareerPlug, I created exactly that. I was constantly hiring, constantly onboarding. But instead of taking it as a nuisance, I saw it as an opportunity to control the quality of talent we would hire, set a high bar for onboarding, product understanding, and coachability of my team members. 

Now, when the chance arose for someone to apply to a role internally and outside of my department, they were already highly qualified for it. In one year, I achieved 13 promotions not just within the CX department, but also into Sales, Operations, and HR. And if you believe that a CX person can’t make it as an engineer or on the Product Team, CareerPlug (and good leaders) prove you wrong. A frontline agent moved to Sales and, a few years later, became a support engineer.

But when they actually become stuck there, they move on and take valuable knowledge of the institution with them. The solution is simple, but requires intentionality: name the career paths, develop skills, and transfer responsibility before they hit a ceiling and leave. It also helps a lot when you build rapport and allies with the other department heads so that you can sponsor your team members. 

What It Creates for You

Building a line of succession leaves room for your personal growth.

If you are a single point of failure on the team, you are not a leader. You are a bottleneck with a title. If nothing works on the team without you, you won't be able to move to the next opportunity, next role, or promotion. And forget about enjoying your two-week vacation. You will come back to a mess only you can clean up.

When I was a Client Experience leader, I knew I had created a skilled, autonomous team when I came back from vacation, and nothing was on fire while I was gone. Developing your people is not about generosity. It's a prerequisite for your own upward mobility. 

Because this part of the equation is rarely mentioned: The leaders who get promoted are disproportionately the leaders who made themselves replaceable. Not through weakness and lack of confidence, but through such effectiveness in developing people that the organization starts trusting the system they created, and not any specific person, even the one who created it.

The Practice, Not the Plan

But what does it actually look like every day? Line of succession means you delegate the decision you are tempted to make yourself. It means you put another name to the project that would normally be associated with your name. It means you have a serious conversation about the underuse of talent and the specific step you are taking to address it.

All of that doesn't show up in the quarterly report. All of that will show up two years later when someone from your team moves to the position you occupied before, and you are already moving further because you made room for both of you to grow. 

That's the line of succession. Not a document. A discipline.