Beyond replacement: Rethinking board succession as stewardship

By Nqobani Mzizi

The truest test of a board's commitment to the future is not the strategy it approves today but the leaders it prepares for tomorrow. Succession is one of the most powerful yet neglected levers of governance. It determines continuity, shapes culture and protects the organisation from the profound risk of dependency on individuals. When reduced to a mechanical exercise in replacement, we miss its deeper role as a system of stewardship and the clearest signal of whether a board is oriented toward the long term or hostage to the immediate moment.

Boards make decisions that shape the future, but those decisions endure only when leadership transitions are intentional. Too many organisations wait for crises before asking who should lead next. By then it is often too late. The absence of a clear succession philosophy creates instability and panic and exposes the organisation to political influence, personality-driven leadership and strategic drift. Succession becomes a gamble instead of a disciplined governance practice.

Succession as stewardship represents a philosophical shift: from managing a departure to upholding a perpetual trust. It recognises that while leaders hold office for a season, their responsibility for the institution’s endurance does not expire. This view transforms planning from an exercise in naming successors into a discipline of institutional fortification, ensuring continuity of capability, coherence of culture and the preservation of wisdom that guides principled decisions.

Succession as stewardship represents a philosophical shift: from managing a departure to upholding a perpetual trust. It recognises that while leaders hold office for a season, their responsibility for the institution’s endurance does not expire. This view transforms planning from an exercise in naming successors into a discipline of institutional fortification, ensuring continuity of capability, coherence of culture and the preservation of wisdom that guides principled decisions.

The private sector has not been immune. Steinhoff’s collapse revealed more than financial misconduct. It exposed a failure of succession thinking. Leadership was concentrated in a small circle that discouraged challenge and allowed unchecked influence to shape decisions. When the crisis came, there was no institutional depth or ethical leadership bench to stabilise the organisation. A lack of renewal created an echo chamber and contributed to the company’s downfall.

The stakes of succession are arguably highest in the public sector, where governance failures directly erode public trust and service delivery. Here, leadership instability is not an operational inconvenience; it is a systemic risk. Acting appointments stretch across years, hollowing out authority, slowing decision-making and diluting accountability. Short-term political interests overshadow long-term public mandates. Oversight bodies that neglect succession stewardship compromise an institution’s intergenerational responsibility to the society it serves.

Strong succession has the opposite effect. It amplifies stability and signals a culture of preparedness. Boards that approach succession as stewardship invest in developing leadership benches that are diverse, capable and aligned to the organisation’s purpose. They understand that competence alone is not enough. Character matters just as much because ethical culture forms the foundation on which all governance outcomes rest. Effective boards plan renewal through thoughtful rotation. They do not wait for vacancies. They think in cycles, not moments. This prepares the organisation for leadership changes long before they occur and ensures that transitions strengthen rather than disrupt the system.

A clear example of strong succession is the leadership transition at Capitec. The founding generation’s seamless handover to a new executive team preserved stability and culture not by chance but by design. This success was rooted in a philosophy that treated succession as a multi-year project of wisdom transfer: the intentional passing on of tacit knowledge, strategic context and cultural nuance that are never captured in a manual.

Wisdom transfer is one of the most overlooked dimensions of succession planning. Without it, leadership renewal induces organisational amnesia. Lessons from crises, negotiations and pivotal decisions vanish with departing leaders. True stewardship demands mechanisms that preserve institutional memory: structured mentorship, reflective dialogues and well-curated handover processes. Wisdom is not a courtesy; it is a critical governance asset that protects the organisation from repeating mistakes and enables new leaders to build on a foundation of understood history.

As the governance era of King IV draws to a close and King V takes effect, both codes affirm this principle. King IV links succession planning to leadership continuity and long-term value creation. King V strengthens this by placing culture, purpose and stewardship at the centre of governance thinking. Succession supports all four governance outcomes articulated in the King Codes: ethical culture, good performance, effective control and legitimacy. Without a coherent succession philosophy, these outcomes become fragile. Transparent, values-driven succession planning signals to stakeholders that the organisation takes its future seriously.

Succession also demands that boards remain honest about their own culture. Leaders cannot pass on what they do not live. If a board operates with silos, unspoken tensions or avoidance of accountability, that culture will be inherited by the next generation of leadership. Stewardship requires boards to hold themselves to the standards they expect from incoming leaders. The culture they shape becomes the legacy they leave.

To rethink succession as stewardship is to shift from replacement to renewal. Succession becomes a philosophy that protects continuity and prepares the organisation for challenges that have not yet emerged. It is a reminder that governance is not only about who leads today but about how well the organisation will be led tomorrow. Leadership changes should strengthen the institution, not destabilise it. When boards embrace this view, succession becomes an act of care for the future rather than a reaction to the present.

Embedding this philosophy requires boards to confront foundational questions:

• Are we grooming future leaders or merely reacting to departures?
• Does our plan protect institutional memory and ethical culture, or does it focus only on technical competence?
• Are we intentional about renewal, ensuring diversity of thought, depth of capability and the transfer of wisdom?
• Do we steward succession as a living system, or manage it as a document updated annually?

Perhaps the most powerful test of succession is this: will the organisation be stronger after the transition than it was before it? If the answer is yes, succession has been treated as stewardship. If the answer is unclear, the work remains unfinished.

Ultimately, succession is not about preparing a person for a seat. It is about preparing the seat for the next custodian. That is stewardship. That is governance.

Nqobani Mzizi is a Professional Accountant (SA), Cert.Dir (IoDSA) and an Academic.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.

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