Coaching practices for Part of Me Wants to Keep My Best People in Roles That Serve Me and to Pick a Successor Who Won't Outshine Me and I'm Uneasy About That I Want to Genuinely Set Up Whoever Comes After Me to Surpass Me So the Thing Outlives My Being Central to it
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Part of Me Wants to Keep My Best People in Roles That Serve Me and to Pick a Successor Who Won't Outshine Me and I'm Uneasy About That I Want to Genuinely Set Up Whoever Comes After Me to Surpass Me So the Thing Outlives My Being Central to it, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- Part of me wants to keep my best people in roles that serve me and to pick a successor who won’t outshine me
- Everything still routes through me
- I’ve started thinking about the people and the work that will be here after I’m gone, and I want what I pour myself into now to matter to those who come after me
- I keep catching myself making calls based on how they’ll make me look rather than what’s actually best for the thing I’m building
- I keep abandoning things the moment it’s clear I won’t personally see them pay off, and I want to be able to pour myself into something that matters even knowing I’ll be long gone before it’s finished.
Practices that may help
- Develop successors who will surpass you
Invest in your successor’s success as a deliberate act of institutional ambition.
Level 5 Leadership: Humility and Will in Great Leaders - Build people’s autonomy and capability
The aim is people who need you less over time, not more.
Servant Leadership, Made Practical - Generativity: investing in what outlasts you
Invest in the next generation or in work that outlives you.
Self-Transcendence: Beyond the Self - Channel ambition to the institution, not yourself
Care more about the organization’s success than your personal legacy.
Level 5 Leadership: Humility and Will in Great Leaders - Cathedral thinking
Commit to projects whose benefits you will not live to see, as medieval builders committed to cathedrals.
The Good Ancestor: Long-Path Thinking for a Meaningful Life - Engage generativity — the natural work of midlife and later seasons
Midlife and later seasons are calling for contribution, mentorship, and transmission — not just personal achievement.
Seasons of Life - Practice foresight and stewardship
Hold the team’s resources and future in trust — decide for the long game, not just this quarter.
Servant Leadership, Made Practical - Build a team whose combined strengths cover all four domains
Hire and assemble deliberately for domain coverage, not for people who think like you.
Strengths-Based Leadership, Made Practical - Watch for the accidental diminisher patterns in yourself
Most Diminishers are not aware they are diminishing — the behaviors that made them effective as individuals undermine them as leaders.
Multipliers: How Leaders Amplify the Intelligence Around Them - Become a talent magnet: attract and deploy people at their best
Multipliers find what people do naturally well and put them in conditions where that genius is essential.
Multipliers: How Leaders Amplify the Intelligence Around Them
Related concerns
- Generation Effect Leadership
Most Diminishers are not aware they are diminishing — the behaviors that made them effective as individuals undermine them as leaders.
Watch for the accidental diminisher patterns in yourself
- Foresight In Leadership
People strong in strategic thinking keep the team focused on what could be, not just what is.
Lead from the strategic thinking domain — absorb and analyze information
- Level 5 Leadership Humility And Will In Great Leaders As A Caregiver
Jim Collins’ Good to Great research found that the leaders who took companies from good to great shared a paradoxical combination of fierce personal will and deep personal humility — what Collins calls Level 5 Leadership. They channeled ambition into the institution, not themselves, and set up successors for greatness rather than engineering dependence.
- Long Term Thinking Leader
People strong in strategic thinking keep the team focused on what could be, not just what is.
- Pre Mortem Leadership
A pre-mortem, developed by psychologist Gary Klein, has a team imagine that a plan has already failed and then work backward to explain why — before any work begins. The technique exploits "prospective hindsight": research found that imagining an outcome as a certainty makes people generate more, and more specific, reasons for it, surfacing risks that ordinary risk assessment misses.
- Ambition Vs Ego Leadership
Care more about the organization’s success than your personal legacy.
Channel ambition to the institution, not yourself
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