The 76 million baby-boomer Americans born between 1946 and 1964 are poised to flood the retirement market this decade. As they exit stage left, the dramatic drop in birth rates from one generation to the next will create a resounding thud. The 46 million Americans that form generation X not only have big shoes to fill – they have too many shoes to fill. The demographic reality of having about 40% less leaders to fill vacant leadership positions during the next decade is more than just cause for concern. More disconcerting still is the realization that many retiring leaders will unknowingly do everything in their power to cripple their successors.

When the workaholic-boomer leaders who fell in line, toed the line, colored in the lines, and epitomized the long grey line reluctantly hand over the baton to the savvy, pragmatic, nomadic, outside-the-box gen-x-rs who reactively hate everything to do with lines, the resulting clash of the titans could send your business careening.

The boomer generation gave the world some of the best leaders of all time. Most current senior corporate leaders are boomers. While their standards and strengths provided unparalleled growth and success, their generational preferences concerning autocracy and structure will undoubtedly contribute to transition conflict in this coming decade. There are without question many leaders that will navigate the shift in power magnificently, but our observations from working with leaders for over twenty years lead us to conclude that a significant percentage of leaders will unwittingly hamper effective leader transitions. Due to culturally reinforced behaviors, we forecast that a majority of boomer-leaders leaving the job market over the next ten years will reflexively employ at least one of the following Crippling Factors:

1. Scarce Power – viewing power as a scarce resource will cause unnecessary delays in the transfer of that power and subsequently cause organization stutters.
2. Light Switch – assuming the transfer of power must happen all at once – in one moment – will limit successor learning and organization effectiveness.
3. Short Leash –micromanage successors with unnecessary life support and who will manage them when you pull the plug?
4. Sink or Swim – throwing successors in shark tanks without access to your wise counsel is petulant and a breach of trust.
5. Fence Sit – considering gen-x successors on probation until you are emotionally prepared to leave, fosters an indecisive and distrustful relationship that leads to hobbling manipulation.
6. Plastic Perfection – valuing image over honesty will saddle your organization with lackluster leaders that culturally force cosmetic compliance instead of facilitate authentic commitment.
7. Meaningless Motion – the age of putting in your time to make the grade has ended – harnessing your successor with obsolete rules and paradigms may cause them to go elsewhere in a hurry.
8. Tried and True – beleaguering successors in skeptical conversations where you embody the answer and they embody the question contradicts inherent equality.

US corporate leader transitions promise to be one of the biggest economic obstacles in the upcoming decade. Organizational redesign might be a small component of the solution, but the foundational breakthrough resides in managing the relationship and processes between leader and successor. Organizations must act expeditiously to plan and foster productive leader transitions, or find something believable on which to blame their future ineptitude.

Productive transitions for key leaders and officers will only be well facilitated through powerful coaching. Unfortunately, most executive coaching does not empower leaders to self-navigate their own transformation. Structures and processes must be established, but the benefits of well-placed wisdom by a trusted advisor can never be under estimated. The book, Leaving Prisons: Release Your Trapped Value, was designed to serve as a compass for leaders navigating this territory. It details many of the intricate connections between organizational change and personal change while supporting leaders as they assess and shift their thinking and behavior with conscious choice.

W.H. Auden said in The Age of Anxiety, “We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die.” The impending leader transitions are organization changes, and all organization change begins with personal change. Regardless of the situation, there is always a correlating personal transformation that enables leaders to propel their organizations toward the desired future. When that personal change is ignored, the organization follows the leader into a prison of oblivious rigidity, crippling its ability to achieve dreams and objectives. The immovable reality is that if our existing leaders do not effectively change themselves, the looming transitions of the next decade will cripple organizational potential and possibility.

Scarce Power. Lord Acton’s 1887 dictum still applies to leaders today, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The viewpoint that power is a scarce resource is a symptom of the dangerous belief that leaders should be judged by a different standard, that they are above the common folk. Leaders who selfishly stockpile power create disempowered organizations and build weak relationships that are disconnected, disrespectful and dysfunctional. Hierarchical position, coercion and adoration give a false sense of pseudo-power, and collude together to support the lie that power is to be hoarded. The reality is that power comes to those who bring others power. Power comes to those who bring hope. Creating power and hope in others are inherently foundational responsibilities of leadership. Power comes not to those to whom others have surrendered. Power comes to those who have surrendered to a greater purpose.

To successfully transition, leaders must incrementally share power over time with successors. Collaborative leadership is required: a leadership that reflexively partners, shares and cooperates. This is a pronounced shift in thinking and behavior for many leaders, but the payoffs will prevent major hiccups in upcoming transitions.

Light Switch. We worked with a corporate President who was planning on retiring in two years. He had selected his replacement and wanted us to work with him to “get him ready.” He also told us up front that he would not let his successor know about the plan until the last minute – he intended to announce his retirement and his successor simultaneously as he walked out the door. We declined on this leader light switch project and later heard the planned successor became disillusioned and took a top job with a competitor.

Transition, at its best is a complex relationship, and relationships take time – most organizations would do well to jettison the light switch theory. It is founded on a belief that leadership is a position. It is not a position; leadership is a social capacity that is only powerful when shared. Leaders become more powerful when they empower others through realizing that leadership is not about them, it is about the purpose and people they serve. When leadership is about you, you are at risk in defining your life by your defects. Leaders saying things like, “that is just the way I am,” “you’ll have to get used to me,” “it’s just like me to be…” and “give me the benefit of the doubt” are probably inept at leader transition and blinded by their excessive narcissism.

Short Leash. Much of our observations have shown that micromanagers, wielders of the short leash, do so out of distrust and fearful self-protection. The scary downside is that leader self-protection hardly ever aligns with leaders’ ethical mandate as fiduciaries: organization protection. One execution-guru CEO we worked with was so controlled by distrust and self-protection that while he was perfecting results at his mammoth company, his wife of twenty-eight years left him for the landscaper that cut the grass of what is now his former home. Through working with us, this CEO realized that his propensity to develop short leash relationships had infused distrust and betrayal in all his relationships. We found excessive internal theft, anemic innovation, and prevailing adversarial attitudes toward management throughout his company. Of the three people he had earmarked as potential successors, the two most desirable were about to negotiate job offers with other firms. His own short leash effectively hamstrung and hung out to dry this CEO.

Short leashes occur when unplanned organizations collide with dysfunctional transitioning leaders. Effective transitions are the simple sequence of key processes. Responsible organizations plan retirements with leaders in advance while successors are groomed and evaluated constantly. As a result of this planning, successors should be selected, promoted and announced as much as eight to twenty-four months prior to a leader’s leaving depending on the size and nature of the organization. After the planning and selection processes, the transition process takes place during the time when both leader and successor share the job, the power, and learn from each other. It is a mentoring time for the leader and a stretching time for the successor. When these processes are effectively in place and appropriate intervention, monitoring, and coaching are applied, transitions propel institutions to new heights of success.

Sink or Swim. The sink or swim strategy is fundamentally flawed in that it presupposes isolation and individuality. Most corporate leaders talk about collaboration and connectedness as mandates for success, yet they encourage disconnected sink-or-swim tactics with successors. Leadership is inherently lonely stuff, but the red flag of sink or swim signals the trapping of value. Tossing successors in the shark tank is a sign of independence driven relationship avoidance. Without relationship there can be no leadership. The best one can hope for in such a circumstance is the thin productivity of cosmetic compliance.

Leadership is ultimately and consummately a relationship, a connection between people. Leadership does not rest in a position; it rests in followers’ convergence. If people follow you, you are leading. Leadership is dependent on people. Leaders do not lead results, profits, outcomes, property, production, or anything else – they will always and only ever lead people. Leadership is also dependent on voluntary relationship, for followers must actually want to follow. So when leaders use sink or swim succession tactics, we know they are aspiring to lead from a distance, and we know they are trapping value and will cripple their successor.

Fence Sit. Leader indecisiveness is a symptom of the illogical feelings of worthlessness. These emotionally stunted feelings and hesitations form cholesterol-like organization bottlenecks and strangle successor effectiveness. To vacillate and consider successors on probation until you are able to tolerate the emotional discomfort associated with transition constitutes an immature betrayal of your replacement and your organization. Successors that spend time with fence sitting leaders, report that they feel distrusted, confused and demeaned. These are relational projections from leaders fighting the deep tumult of worthlessness and infecting newly appointed leaders. Manipulation and dishonesty typically govern the relationships between leader and successor in situations like this.

Fence sitters don’t realize that abdicating choice is a choice in and of itself. When they fully realize that by avoiding decisions they are adversely decisive, they not only face their fears but also potentially feel free to make alternative choices. It is this courageous freedom that releases trapped value in themselves and their organization. Transition takes time and doubt is the enemy of time. Fence sitters need deadlines, but more importantly they need doubt-coaching throughout the transition process; the selection decision they made previously is usually still valid despite their current feelings.

Plastic Perfection. Successful transitions require authenticity. Your successor and your organization need you to be real in order to harvest the data required for leadership continuity. Valuing image over honesty will saddle your organization with lackluster bosses that culturally coerce instead of facilitate authentic commitment and engagement. The biggest root cause to the plastic leader’s problems is that successors never get to know them; inheritors intuitively sense you are covering up something and they know better than to trust that. The plastic leader’s prison cell is their outer shell. People never get close enough to form relationships, so transition is tenuous at best.

For the transitioning leader, being always transcends that which appears to be: appearance. Successors sense the difference. Transition is the time to clear out the closets of skeletons, discuss the undiscussables, and disclose the secrets. Authenticity is scary because it requires that we speak of our own disingenuousness and hypocrisy. While this is uncomfortable and rare for leaders, do it anyway – it works. Leaders are not without defect, and exposing and discussing your obvious errors authentically shows that you are honest and can be trusted. Being authentic is the embodiment of truth, and truth is indiscriminant to and inconvenient for appearances. Truth invites scrutiny, and for successors, truth is a platform for future success.

Meaningless Motion. A retiring Group President we were coaching was in deep conflict with her gen-x successor over the rewarding of empty effort. The heir-apparent leader was annoyed by how much time was spent making sure people were in certain places at certain times as opposed to managing results and outcomes. The soon to retire leader was patiently and condescendingly extolling to her successor the supposedly self-evident mandate to manage meaningless motion. After talking with them for a while, I asked for a break and took the President aside.

We knew each other well and we talked about how her replacement just wasn’t getting it. We also talked about how the world is much different now and that new perspectives were required to create a better future. We landed together on the thought that as a mentor, it was time for her to hand over even more control and to reflect and offer advise on the fresh thinking she hears. She called me later that month and said she was now living by a new standard of wisdom for herself, “Don’t just do something, stand there!”

It’s easy to say the world has changed, but it is an entirely different thing to live through it. The times have shifted. What worked in the past worked well, but indications are that it might not work that well in the future. The age of putting in your time to make the grade has ended, and unknowingly harnessing your successor with obsolete rules and paradigms could potentially derail them and your institution. Whether leaders are forcing antiquated time and space mandates or they are busy pushing outmoded standards of urgency and meaningless motion, transition is a time to look at life reflectively and harvest the choicest fruits to empower your replacement.

Forgoing adequate observation and reflection, leaders sometimes chose inactionable, purposeless direction. To deflect attention from their ignorance further, they employ urgency. Urgency captures attention through anxiety and creates propped-up popularity, but is often light on substance and staying power. Urgency without purpose is a defense against identity and meaning. Too often leaders appear as empty bobbling heads, urgently whining about the next faddish flurry of asinine commotion. Successful successors and accomplished organizations will be aided by your reflection and generative conversation. Resist the temptation to colonially reinforce outdated ideas that will merely detract from your legacy.

Tried and True. Transitioning leaders must challenge their thinking about people. How we view people matters. The tyrant views people as a means to their ends; conversely, the honorable leader views people as ends in and of themselves. If human equality is holy, then elitist exploitation of people is evil. The way in which you view people inexorably infects your leadership. Beleaguering your successor’s brilliance with skepticism in one-way conversations where you embody the answer and they embody the question contradicts your inherent equality.

That which was tried and true worked for you. You are not your successor. Moreover, they are your equal. Humility will always be the bedrock essence of leadership. However strenuously we strive for importance, leaders themselves are not nearly as relevant as those they serve, and during transition you are called to serve your successor. Countermanding requisite humility is the fact that most leaders remain constantly in search of their own significance, and are thus chained to illogical, unarticulated fantasies of being God. Your past accomplishments are an evanescent support of self-pertinence. In transition, your self-importance is irrelevant. The platform you help create for your successor is of utmost importance.

The next decade in US corporate leadership will see unprecedented tempests and turmoil. The king pin position of world economic power will shift from the US to China. Interest rates will rise. US debt as a percentage of GDP will probably shatter the country’s financial standing in the world. Millions of Americans are now without jobs, and many of those jobs will not return. Technology advancements will most probably make all previous investment obsolete. Green standards, industries, and energies will disrupt business operations. Demographic shifts will crowd the retirement market, create a resounding vacuum in leadership jobs, and strain an already struggling health care system. During all these and many more challenges, most corporations will transition virtually all top leadership positions. If leadership transition is not part of your strategy, it might end up being part of your epitaph.

Adolf Hitler was undoubtedly an influencer, but he was emphatically not a leader. He was a manipulator, a coercer, and a consummate extortionist, but he was not a leader. It is high time that we distinguish between tyranny and leadership. To define leadership as mere influence is to emasculate its inherent morality and disrespect the intrinsic willingness of followers.

A leader is a disrupter, a fire-starter, someone who goes around turning things right-side-up. This natural disturbance arises from beneficial internal unrest and anxiety, from an innate need to build purpose and right wrongs in the world.

The notion of leadership is best described in comparison to tyranny. We all struggle against the toxicity of tyranny. We all also participate in the venom of despotism and its many disguises. It started at birth; we are all born tyrants. We are born with an innate desire for unilateral control over everything around us, and if you are a parent, you have witnessed the shadows of tyranny from the front row.

Tyranny takes many forms. Sometimes it is outright forced compliance; sometimes it appears as benevolent dictatorship; sometimes patriarchy; sometimes paternalism; sometimes colonialism. In whatever size or shape it assumes, tyranny is undeniably the manipulative forcible coercion of others’ free will.

Tyranny can be a phone call from the lonely grandmother covertly dripping in guilt, the drill sergeant’s demeaning scream intending to help keep you alive when you face battle, the selling of a human slave to be owned as property by another human, the state government requiring every person to buy health insurance, the boy who buys flowers and dinner hoping to have sex from his date at the end of the night, the business owner who raises commodity prices during a natural catastrophe, the minister using guilt to extort more money from parishioners, or the wife who uses sex with her husband to manipulate his actions or decisions. Regardless of tyranny’s profile, to be an instrument of someone’s will other than your own is dehumanizing. Human exploitation is the hallmark of tyranny.

Leaders are an irritation and an affront to tyrants, representing a more restorative and enduring form of maturation. They stand in strong and subtle opposition to tyranny. Their lives project unforced rhythms of healing and humanization. To be a leader is to be a force of nature, a power to harmonize, a balanced treaty of peace. Hierarchical position, coercion and adoration give a false sense of pseudo-power, and collude together to support the lie that power is a scarce resource to be hoarded. Power comes to those who bring others power. Power comes to those who bring hope. Creating power in others is one of the primary duties of a leader. Power comes not to those to whom others have surrendered. Power comes to those who have surrendered to a greater purpose. At the core, a flawless leader is a living picture of restoration, responsible healing, and lavish service.

The supreme quest of the flawless leader is to surrender to purpose, and worthy purpose is unknowable apart from seeking God on God’s terms. This fact presents a perplexity for many leaders. Searching out a personal God-connection, striving to relate one-on-one with the mystery that is God, appears to fully engage a leader’s deepest, most powerful and most relevant self.

Leadership is foundationally a relationship, not a position. Leadership is more philosophical than scientific, more mysterious than obvious, more complex than simplistic; and unavoidably, yes, leadership is imbued with spiritual aspects. Whether the spiritual is currently culturally acceptable or politically correct is irrelevant regarding its impact in leadership. If the prevailing public opinion dissuades leaders from being spiritually adept, this merely presents additional facets to this perplexity. There will always be times and situations where greater purpose will call leaders to live counter-culturally. The leader who avidly avoids seeking God will most probably and eventually frustrate and denigrate followers into ridicule by giving them, in terms of one of Thomas Paine’s favorite fables, an ass for a lion.

To be sure, just seeking God in no way guarantees purpose. It is the only soil in which the seeds of significance have a chance of growing. Contributing to this conundrum further, there are thousands of shallow religious institutions supporting tyranny, terror, exploitation, and abuse littered across our planet. God in a box is not God at all. When you meet God on God’s terms and no one else’s, the richness of purpose’s soil is enhanced greatly.

History is clear: attempt to bind God to an organization or legislate holiness and you are connected to God no longer. Constrict leadership to an institution’s boundaries or to the confines of one person, and you convulse it to oblivion. Construct leadership in a factory and relationships in a laboratory, and your calculated control mechanisms become your demise. Assemble the god you desire, and you become just another abusive despot plundering possibility and significance with the bile of shallowness. The uncomfortable concrete reality is that leaders “playing god” through extreme command and control are meaningless, toxic tyrants.

How we view people matters. Our relationship to God impacts our view of people. The tyrant views people as a means to their ends. The leader views people as ends in and of themselves. If human equality is holy, the elitist exploitation of other people as less than equal is evil.

In addition to leading others as equals, relating to God enables leaders to love more effectively. In their book, Encouraging the Heart, Kouzes and Posner interviewed Major-General John H. Stanford on his secrets to developing leaders and he said, “The secret to success is to stay in love. Staying in love gives you the fire to really ignite other people, to see inside other people…I don’t know of any other fire, any other thing in life that is more exhilarating and is more positive a feeling than love is.”

This type of love is key to leadership relationships. The mature know this instinctively. More importantly, love that is enduring and significant is not a mere feeling; it is an act of the will that just happens to be accompanied by occasionally enjoyable feelings. M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled, brilliantly defined love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” So mature love is simply a spiritual commitment to yourself or another.

The fruition of the focused commitment to love is a spiritual manifestation of flawlessly leading. Furthermore, love, seeking God, and submission to worthy purpose are inextricably linked to leadership and each other at many levels. Leaders who struggle in these areas struggle proportionately in their leadership. Navigating this perplexity successfully is principally dependent on a personal, healthy relationship with God, as the utmost source of meaningful love and significant purpose.

Even the healthiest of organizations produces toxicity and is debilitated and damaged by a lack of compassion. In general, most organizations and communities are suffering from a lack of leadership, a scarcity of love, and lackluster purpose and meaning. Flawless leaders are unquenchably called to stand in this gap. As Henri Nouwen said, “Beneath all the great accomplishments of our time there is a deep current of despair. While efficiency and control are the great aspirations of our society, the loneliness, lack of friendship and intimacy, broken relationships, boredom, feelings of emptiness and depression, and a deep sense of uselessness fill the hearts of millions of people in our success-oriented world.” In this dark milieu, flawless leaders shine brightly.

Seeking God, worthy purpose, and love is a level of human maturity that creates challenging conundrums and perplexities for leaders. Do it anyway. Don’t ask how; just dive in. You won’t drown. When you feel as though you are drowning, dive deeper. It will take time: fruit matures throughout an entire season, not overnight. It takes a lifetime to mature fully, and only a moment to restart the continual process. Emotional and spiritual maturity are lifetime processes of replacing lies with truths, hate with love, doubt with faith, disingenuousness with authenticity, and closed-off self-protection with trust and vulnerability. Only the strong mature. The weak use their highchair as a platform to whine and blame.

Leaders often choose blindness to unseen matters. Consciously or unconsciously, that which is not task accomplishment is too often ignored. Years ago, when I was contemplating a key strategic move in my own organization, a trusted advisor asked me why I was hesitant to operate in the world of the unseen, “God operates there; why shouldn’t you?” This feedback helped to expose my unhelpful assumptions (which I was unconsciously choosing) that would have eventually reduce my firm’s value. Since then, I have found the same advice applies extensively to leadership. Leaders often avoid the unseen.

There are many layers of the human system in which we lead: the most blatant is the content – the “what” we are working on, the area where most leaders start and most get stuck. Some leaders multi-task and also work on the process, the “how” we are working together. This applies to both the content and the efficiency and effectiveness of the human system, the extent to which we optimally interrelate. Still, another layer of leadership is the level of paradigm, the basis for action and reaction, the “why” we do what we do and how we do it. Discerning, understanding, and leading paradigms are “career critical” for flawless leaders. Paradigms cannot be seen, and like the eighty percent of the iceberg that is beneath the surface, they comprise the vast majority of the arena for leadership. Paradigms give us clues to the various meanings and purposes that resonate in followers. Flawless leaders are not blind. They see the entire arena of leadership, including the normally unseen areas. Flawless leaders help to give sight to the blind by articulating the unseen, yet important. Flawless leaders do not allow task execution to eclipse their full leadership calling and responsibility.

In a large company’s lunch area I overheard two employees talking about an ambitious Vice President, Howard. One employee asked the other, “Do you know what the difference between Howard and God is?” The other, obviously in on the joke, replied, “Yes, God doesn’t think He’s Howard.” I instantly recognized Howard’s classic leader flaw: unknowingly trapping value through blind ambition. Our ambition to be significant and relevant can be our most limiting factor as a leader. In learning to reject blind ambition, flawless leaders embrace their irrelevance by submission to worthy purpose. Consequently they appear endearing, not arrogant. People are drawn to them instead of repelled away from them. And they engender full engagement instead of witty quips behind their backs in the break room. Flawless leaders are living proof that real leadership is not commerce and compromise but deep relationship and meaningful service.

There are unending ways in which we all limit our potential and trap the release of our value in the world, but leaders commonly default-choose failure like Howard did, by opting for self-protection wrapped in ambition. For leaders to avoid certain failure, the trick is they must do that which they strive so strenuously against: surrender. Leaders fail when they refuse to surrender to purpose, for what they haven’t learned is that surrender is more powerful than conquest. Conquest alone cannot bring significance; only contribution offers the possibility of significance. Conquest takes; contribution gives. Conquest destroys; contribution creates. There is always a lavish generosity resulting from a leader’s powerful surrender to meaningful purpose. The question with which flawless leaders must wrestle constantly is “what purpose is worthy of my surrender?”