The 15-step model is the succession sequence from Robert Forto’s Doctor of Strategic Leadership dissertation, December 2024, The research took up transgenerational succession and emerging female leaders in an Alaska family firm, and built the steps on sled-dog teamwork as the metaphor, not as a training method. Peak Experience lives by that sequence because it is the research we teach. We do not rename the steps, and we do not swap them for an ownership quiz or a vacancy checklist. The model is the order the decisions get made in. The firm still has to make them.
A Succession Plan?
Arshavskiy defines succession the way a personnel institute does. Britain’s CIPD, as she quotes it: identifying and developing future leaders, senior managers, and other people for business-critical seats, short term or long term. Her objective is narrow and useful. The organization should be able to fill a top seat no matter when or how it opens. Retirement, promotion, end of contract, sabbatical, medical leave.
That is a vacancy plan. A family firm needs one. It is not the succession.
Her process has five moves:
- Identify the key leadership positions.
- Identify how those seats go empty, and when.
- Identify who on the current staff could fill them.
- Run a gap analysis: what they can do now, what the seat needs, what training, skill, experience, or trait is missing.
- Review the names and the seats often, and change them when reality changes.
Her options for closing the gap: training, mentorship by the incumbent, shadowing the incumbent’s day, and developmental assignments. Stretch work, a temporary promotion, or a simulation if the real assignment does not exist.
Then a transparency argument. Tell people early and you buy trust, fewer rumors, and a middle layer that can translate the plan. Tell people early and you also risk a misread, a person who was not chosen, pressure on the person who was, and a competitor hiring them away. Culture decides which risk you take. Hierarchical shops stay on a need-to-know. Flatter ones do better saying it early, if they have a mitigation for each downside.
None of that is wrong. Most of it is incomplete for a family firm, because the next person is not a seat.
Where a family firm misreads it
The article assumes the candidate is staff, the vacancy is a role, and readiness is a training problem. In a family firm the candidate may also be a child, a spouse, or a cousin. The seat may also be the paper. The gap may be willingness, life stage, or a skill the founder does not have, not a missing module.
If you run her five moves and stop, you get a binder of names and a course list. The founder is still the person who decides. The successor has been shadowed, not trusted. Step 6 is the correction: succession is not an event but a process. A vacancy plan that waits for retirement is an event with a workbook attached.
On a team, the next dog does not learn the trail by staring at the lead. They take a command. Metaphor only. Shadowing is staring.
Her five moves, and the step that finishes each one
1. Identify the key seats.
Step 12. The key to success is planning.
Write the seats that break if one person is gone for thirty days. Not the org chart. The eval, the hard client, the money conversation, the exception only the founder is allowed to grant. If you cannot name the seat, you cannot name a successor to it.
Do not stop at titles. A title with no decisions under it is not a key position. It is a place to put a family member.
2. Identify how the seat goes empty, and when.
Step 14. Set a date. Step 6 again. The process includes the unplanned opening, not only the retirement party.
Arshavskiy is right that the vacuum is not only retirement. Medical leave, a sabbatical, a contract end, a promotion. Add the family triggers the corporate list skips: the founder who will not pick a year, the successor who leaves for a decade, the spouse who exits the marriage and not the firm.
“Someday” is not a when. Put a date on the planned opening. Put a separate date on the review if the planned opening slips. An unplanned opening still needs a name on the seat this quarter, or the vacuum is the plan.
3. Identify who could fill it.
Step 3. Communicate with second-generation family members/successors regarding career interests, psychosocial needs, and life-stage development. Step 7. Rather than presenting the business as a requirement, present it as an option.
Her question is who on staff would best fill the vacuum. That is a forecast. Step 3 is the conversation the forecast skips. Career interest. What they need from the work. What this life stage can actually hold.
Naming someone because they are competent and nearby is how you assign a life. Step 7: offer the seat. Do not install them in it because the gap analysis liked their name. A person who was not asked will either decline in the room or decline by doing the job badly.
If more than one family member could hold it, write why this one, this year. That rationale is Step 10. Create a rationale for your decision. Birth order is not a rationale.
4. Gap analysis.
Step 9. Encourage complementary skills. Step 8. Obtain outside experience. Step 5. Determine the factors that affect succession outcomes and address them.
She wants the gap in training, skills, experience, and traits that would impede them in the new role. Do that. Then refuse the usual answer, which is “make them a copy of the incumbent.”
If the founder is the rainmaker, the gap is not another rainmaker. Step 9 wants the skill the firm does not have. Numbers. The system nobody wrote down. The client conversation the founder avoids. Write the gap as a missing capability of the firm, not as a shortfall against the founder’s personality.
Step 8 is the experience line in her gap analysis, and it is the one training shops underweight. The preference in the model is outside experience, not a better view of the founder’s Tuesday. If the window for three to five years elsewhere is gone, shrink it. Do not replace it with a course. A mentor who is not the parent belongs here too. That is Step 1. Start with mentors. The incumbent can teach the work. The incumbent cannot be the only mirror.
Traits belong in the gap only if you can point to a decision they wreck. “Not ready” is not a trait. It is an unwritten standard.
5. Review often. Change the names when reality changes.
Step 6. Succession is not an event but a process. Step 4. Founders and successors need to work through generational and communication gaps and address the factors that influence outcomes.
A plan that still lists a person who left, or a seat the founder quietly took back, is not a living plan. Review is a meeting with a date, not a promise to stay flexible. Step 14 carries the review the same way it carries the handoff.
When the name changes, say so to the person who was on the page and the person who is on it now. An updated spreadsheet that nobody hears is how the communication gap starts.
Her four options, and what each one is not
Training. Formal, informal, in-house, off-site. She is honest that training, including simulated practice, prepares a candidate only so far. Senior seats need hands-on work. Keep the courses that teach a missing skill. Do not count a course as Step 8, and do not count it as Step 15. Let it go. A certificate does not move a decision off the founder’s desk.
Mentorship. Useful, and already in the model as Step 1. Set the period. Name what “suitable” means before the period starts, or the evaluation is a mood. In a family firm the incumbent-mentor is also the parent. That dual seat is a factor under Step 5. A second mentor, not related to the outcome, is the mitigation. Step 11: you are not alone in this. One mentor who shares the kitchen is not a bench.
Shadowing. Real days, not a tour. Limited use. Thirty days of watching teaches the vocabulary. It does not teach the call. End shadowing on a date, and replace it with a decision the successor makes while the founder is in the room and silent. If shadowing has no end date, it is avoidance.
Developmental assignments. This is the option that matches the model. A temporary promotion or a stretch seat with a real client, a real number, and a real miss. Step 9 lives here if the stretch is a skill the founder does not already own. A simulation is the fallback when the firm truly cannot offer the seat. It is a fallback, not a preference. Family firms usually can offer the seat. They do not want the miss on the founder’s watch.
Transparency, without the corporate sermon
She lists both sides. Early word builds trust, lets the middle layer translate, cuts rumors, and tells a potential successor they are in the conversation. Early word can also be misread, anger the person not chosen, load pressure onto the person who was, and invite a competitor.
In a family firm the middle layer is often three people, and two of them are related. The rumor does not wait for an announcement. It starts at the table the night the founder says “someday” and the successor hears a different year.
Step 4 is the work. Say who is being prepared, for which seat, on what date, and what is not decided yet. Say it to the successor, to the family member who is not the successor, and to the employee who thought they were next. One audience and a hope that the others will be mature is how you get the downside she warns about.
Step 7 keeps the announcement from becoming a cage. Prepared for a seat is not sentenced to the firm. Step 13 is the mitigation when the room cannot hold the person who was not chosen. An advisor who is not in the will can hear the objection without it becoming a Sunday fight.
Do not use “need to know” as a cover for not having the conversation with your own successor. Hierarchical silence is a culture. In a family firm it is usually fear of the reaction. Name the reaction you are avoiding. That is the factor.
What you write before you leave the table
One page. Founder and successor both write. Trade. Keep the lines a teammate would recognize on Monday.
- The seats. Three decisions that break if the founder is gone for thirty days. Not titles.
- The opening. Planned date. Review date if it slips. Name on the seat if the opening is unplanned.
- The offer. Who was asked. What they said about interest and this life stage. Who was not asked, and has been told they were not asked.
- The gap. One skill the firm does not have. Where they will practice it outside the founder’s shadow. The mentor who is not the parent.
- The assignment. The real decision they will make before the course, the shadowing, or the simulation. End date on the watching.
- The release. One decision the founder will not make after the date. Step 15. If the training plan is thick and this line is blank, you built a vacancy binder.
If you are interested in working with us we have a 15-step, succession model coaching program. It is a researched path for moving ownership and leadership across generations, with special attention to the emerging next leader, including daughters stepping into the lead. Book a call today.
