If You Can't Be Replaced You Can't Be Promoted. Career Growth Through Succession Planning.

Welcome to my newsletter! I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. I write this newsletter I've called Scarlet Ink, which is a weekly newsletter on tech industry careers and tactical leadership advice.

Free members can read some amount of each article, while paid members can read the full article. For some, part of the article is plenty! But if you'd like to read more, I'd love you to consider becoming a paid member. All of my articles are intended to be evergreen (readable and valid forever). Some weeks I have fresh content; other weeks I'll update/rewrite something from 4+ years ago because I want to keep the quality of all articles high.

And yes, this article applies to engineers, project managers, and designers. Everyone needs to think about who will replace them.

Years ago, I was internally hired to build the engineering organization for Kids Devices. The existing engineering group was small (a total of approximately 20 people), and the business was profitable and growing quickly.

I'd chosen this position specifically because of the promise of growth. I knew that if nothing changed regarding business profitability and growth trajectory, the engineering organization was almost guaranteed to grow quickly. My goal was to find a role that would bring me from a Level 7 Senior Engineering Manager to a Level 8 Director of Technology. A promotion at this level is a difficult promotion to get, so I had to approach it purposefully.

When I joined, I already had quite a few open positions. I certainly put out feelers to engineers I knew to help the engineering managers on my team fill out their open positions. But I made one hire my top priority. My successor.

I'd just been hired into the group. And part of my hiring agreement was that I'd committed to my manager (the Director of the organization) that I would stick around for 3 years. This meant that I theoretically had years before I should worry about needing a successor.

Why then did I decide that my first hire needed to be my successor? That's a large part of what this article is about.

I thankfully did hire my successor as one of my first hires. I was upfront with him, explaining my goals, plans, and timeline. Around three years later (exactly on schedule), I was promoted to Director. Shortly afterward I took a leave of absence, and my successor took over. Since then, my successor was promoted to Director as well. It all went according to plan. Which is remarkable.

Part of that success was luck, but it also took careful planning. And far too many people don't do this type of planning. Maybe you can be different.

What is succession planning?

Early in my career, I was asked about my succession plan. I named someone and thought I was done. "In the event I'm hit by a bus, Hector should take over."

The problem is that succession planning isn't about just pointing at someone. If Hector doesn't know how to do my job, he certainly can't take over. And if my manager doesn't trust Hector, that won't work either.

Naming someone is a final task of succession planning. The succession planning process is about the complex task of getting someone ready to take over your role (or a portion of your role). If I were a more experienced person at the time, a proper response from me could have been:

"As a result of years of work, Hector is ready to take over my job when i'm needed elsewhere, or if something happens to me. He already knows all our major partners and team members, and they know and trust him. He's done all aspects of my job at least a few times."

Let's walk through the major aspects of succession planning and break them down. Because that's what I feel like doing.

Your successor knows everyone you rely on to do your job well.

Let's say you have to occasionally post marketing images on the Amazon retail site. Your successor needs to know who you rely on to get those images created. Or maybe you need a last-minute code change pushed to production. Your successor needs to know the person who has to sign off on the change.

If you get hired into a new role, one of the hard issues to solve is "Who do I need to talk to about this?" - Your successor requires those answers.

Your successor is known and trusted by those who rely on you.

You frequently partner with a peer engineering manager on tasks. They need to know and trust your successor.

All the design reviews and engineering promotions require your organization's principal engineer. They need to know and trust your successor.

The requirements of your product are written by your product manager. They certainly need to know and trust your successor.

The point is that you've built a working relationship with a long list of people. If you want someone to take over some or all of your job, you'll need to make sure that these people also know your successor.

Building trust from scratch is difficult when you take over a new role, and you should ensure your successor has this solved.

Your successor has done all aspects of your job.

This one should be obvious, but plenty of people say, "This person could probably figure this out." That's not good enough.

You need to think through all the major aspects of your job.

You regularly write a weekly report on your team's operational events. Or you update the ad designs to include the current sale prices for your products. Maybe you deal with major operational outage events for a specific system.

Your successor shouldn't do the major aspects of your job for the first time when you're gone.

Who should care about succession planning?

Trick question! Everyone should care.

If you are senior enough to be relied upon to do complex work, you should be doing succession planning. This is because anything complex enough would take time for someone else to figure out. This means it's easiest and cheapest to leave you doing it. You can't be trusted to take on more important work if you're a single point of failure on other important work.

An employee who is the only one that knows how to do a critical task is valuable, but not the type of person you want to promote or put onto yet more critical tasks. They're the type of person you keep exactly where they are.

To grow your career, you want to take on more complex, difficult, and valuable work. You can't take on these opportunities if you're already busy with your existing work. When opportunities arise, you want to be ready to quickly and easily hand off your other responsibilities. Or even better, have already handed off your responsibilities and be sitting there with your feet on your desk. This can only be done if you were thinking about succession planning early.

Succession planning isn't just about handing off junk work. This is a growth opportunity for someone else. And as I said, this topic is for everyone.

If you're interested in growing your career, you know how it's frequently done? You become the succession plan of someone else. So everything I have said could also apply to you from the other side. A mirror of these steps I'm walking through. A great way to grow is to help someone with their succession planning.

I had a mentee at Amazon who worked for a peer senior manager. This mentee wanted to be the succession plan of their manager. A fine and worthy goal. However, they were frustrated because their manager wouldn't give them a bigger team.

"My manager keeps suggesting I take over her project review meeting, and maybe attend her Director's monthly status review in her place. It's so frustrating. She's just handing me the grunt work she doesn't want to do. I don't want to do that boring work. I think I'm ready to manage more of her team!"

I had to shake some sense into him.

"Dude." (yes, I say dude pretty frequently) "Your boss is offering you a chance to represent her entire org with her boss? You know that's textbook succession planning right? She's handing you a growth opportunity on a silver platter, and you're calling it grunt work?! She's literally handing you a part of the next job."

As a senior leader, it has been astonishing how hard it can be to find someone willing to step in and replace you in the boring tasks of senior leadership.

Instead, everyone clamors for the "glamorous" parts of career growth. The bigger team. The biggest project.

However, the most reliable way to become the default succession plan is to take over the most routine and boring parts of your manager's job. Once you've represented your manager 40 times in every leadership meeting with their peers, it'll become obvious to everyone that you're the next leader in line. In a similar and boring way, I've found immense growth opportunities in writing my organization's status reports.

It's quite dumb in many ways, but heck, we're not here to judge. We're here to grow our careers.