Second Best

Some years ago, a manager gave me a deceptively simple objective for the coming year: develop my second best.

It made sense. Nobody should be the only person capable of doing something important. But it also made me wonder: second best at what, exactly?

Rather than looking for one replacement, I started thinking about the different capabilities behind what I did. That gave me a question which soon became a habit, one I still practise today.

The question before the meeting

Before I enter a meeting or join a discussion, I ask myself:

Who could do this if I'm not around?

If someone comes to mind, excellent. If nobody does, I ask who comes closest. Then I try to identify the gap: what experience, context, confidence or opportunity would that person need to handle this without me?

Once the gap is visible, there is something concrete to do. Bring the person into the discussion. Share the reasoning, not just the answer. Let them try. Give them responsibility, and be available when they need support.

The question changes my role in the room. I'm no longer thinking only about what I can contribute today, but about who could contribute tomorrow.

More than succession planning

Large companies often call this succession planning. In my experience, it is frequently approached as a one-to-one exercise: one position, one potential successor, one name in a box on an organization chart.

That is useful as far as it goes, but my approach is different. I'm not looking for one person to inherit everything I do. I'm looking at the individual capabilities behind the work. The closest match for a technical discussion might not be the person best suited to lead a decision or coach a colleague.

That makes my version of succession planning continuous and one-to-many. Instead of periodically naming a successor, I look for opportunities to close small gaps in everyday work. And I don't want anyone to remain second best forever.

A year later

Well, a year later I was back in a planning discussion with my manager. She asked how I'd fulfilled the goal: had I developed my second best?

I had a set of names on a piece of paper. Not one designated successor, but people with different strengths who had grown into different parts of the work. Together, they could do what I did—and go beyond it.

That piece of paper was my answer. What mattered even more was the habit behind it. I had stopped thinking of succession as finding the next me, and started thinking about how to make sure the work could grow beyond me.

And I haven't kept that habit to myself. I try to instil it in the specialists and experts around me: before their next meeting or discussion, who could take their place? If nobody could, who's closest, and what would help them close the gap?

That is where the idea really starts to multiply. It isn't just me developing my second best; it's other experts developing theirs, and those people eventually doing the same.

A team built around one indispensable expert has a hidden weakness: that expert becomes a single point of failure. The better outcome is a team that can keep moving, challenge the old answers, and improve on them.

Which leads to another question: how should we measure an expert in the first place?