The Operations Bridge

Ask most operations leaders if they have a succession plan and they’ll say yes. Ask them to name who steps into their own role tomorrow, and the confidence drops fast. We’re good at planning for machine downtime. We’re much worse at planning for people downtime, even though people leave far more predictably than equipment fails.

I learned this the hard way when a shift supervisor I depended on gave two weeks’ notice. Two weeks. All the tribal knowledge, all the relationships, all the judgment calls he made without thinking twice — gone, on a timeline I didn’t control.

Start with an honest map

The exercise that changed things for us was simple and uncomfortable: for every key role, list who could step in tomorrow, who could step in within six months with development, and who has zero readiness. Seeing that third column filled in for half our supervisory roles was a wake-up call. We had been operating on borrowed time without realizing it.

Development has to be deliberate, not accidental

• Give high-potential people real decisions to make, not just observation time.
• Let them run a huddle or lead a root cause session while the current leader is still there to coach.
• Be explicit that you’re developing them — ambiguity about intent kills motivation faster than a slow timeline does.
• Revisit the readiness map quarterly, not once a year.

The uncomfortable part: developing your replacement

There’s a quiet fear in building a strong bench — that you’re training someone to take your job. I’ve felt it myself. But the leaders who get promoted fastest are almost always the ones who’ve made themselves replaceable, because it signals they can be trusted with something bigger. Holding onto knowledge as job security is a short-term strategy that caps your ceiling.

A bench isn’t built in the two weeks after someone resigns. It’s built in the eighteen months before, in all the ordinary days when it felt like there was no urgency to do it.