Organizational transitions involve more than balance sheets and operational plans—they require navigating the emotional dynamics that often make or break leadership changes. In this episode, we speak with leadership development expert and author of Succeeding: Stepping Up Without Stepping In It, Albert Ciuksza. With decades of consulting experience, Albert walks us through the nuanced dynamics between successors and predecessors in asphalt and beyond. He emphasizes emotional intelligence as the key to managing transitions effectively and warns how ignoring the human side of leadership can derail even the best-laid plans. Whether you’re planning an exit or preparing to step up, this conversation gives you the tools to lead a successful transition.
Published Jun 10, 2025
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and share your journey to where you are today?
I’m Albert Ciuksza of Solutions 21. Great job on the pronunciation, by the way. I'm Senior Vice President of Growth and Development. I’ve been at the organization for about nine years but my background has been from startups, large corporate, nonprofit economic development and all the way to the consulting work that we do today. Solutions 21 is a human capital firm and we focus largely on leadership growth and development. That was really what sparked the conversation we're going to have today. I was coaching a lot of people who are succession candidates, generational in terms of kids or family members or just frankly the changing of the guard and the inevitable shifting transition. So it was coaching in that context that really got me started on this journey of learning about that process.
Could you share one of the most unexpected lessons you've learned on your leadership journey?
I would say earlier in my career I was someone who probably judged executive leaders particularly harshly. If I'm being completely candid, I would be frustrated at their communication or lack of communication or decisions that they would make. So I always had said early in my career, if I was going to step into one of those roles that I would do it so much differently. All of those things when you're younger and less experienced, you assume about yourself. When I started to work with people at those levels, I realized how empathetic I became for people who are taking on those key leadership roles. They're not easy. Communication is extremely difficult and ultimately, there's a lot of weight on their shoulders. As someone who was 10 levels away from any senior executive, I just couldn't understand. From a leadership perspective, I think it's just much harder to do that role than people assume that it is until they're sitting in that seat or working closely with those people who are making some of those hard calls.
What are the three most important qualities a leader should have?
I hate to do one, two, and three but let's go with it. One of the things that has been interesting in our work is uncovering that the key skill in leadership is emotional intelligence. When we look at what executives or what search firms are looking for in C-level roles, we're looking at how leaders are judged at any level. If you look at basically every piece of research, the first thing that drives employee retention, employee commitment, employee engagement is emotional intelligence.
In fact, there's a really interesting piece of research that the Harvard Business Review published where they looked at job descriptions for C-level roles from 2000 to roughly 2020. What you see is the percentage change in the interest in having these emotional intelligence and people skills skyrockets about 40%. In that time, the interest in having technical skills for those roles basically plummets at the same rate. It ends up looking like alligator jaws, where at this point, because the job of being a CEO is so complex, or being a C-level leader is so complex, you can't afford to be holding all the information in your head. What your job really is, is putting people in the best possible process to succeed in their roles and that EQ piece is the common thread. Certainly, there are other things. If we did two and three, being able to manage conflict or being adaptable. There are so many different things that I would list, but first and foremost, it would be hard to challenge that one would be emotional intelligence.
Could you share a failure or challenge you've experienced as a leader and talk about how you navigate that?
I was talking to a friend of mine about the challenges of leadership, and he said ‘you can't just be the boss when you're handing out bonus checks.’ And I've really loved that line ‘cause it really indicates the difficulty of playing a true leadership role in an organization. There's reason why you walk into a bookstore, if you do that anymore, and see racks and racks of books about leadership. There's an almost mystical quality to what it looks like. Failure and challenge in navigating those things as a leader is, from what I have witnessed in helping coach executives and people who are stepping into those roles, is the crucial ability that those folks tend to have. So if you have emotional intelligence and you're able to negotiate challenges and failure, that is what will help you be most successful in those leadership roles because folks then learn that you're a real human, you’re not an automaton.
On a personal level, I have been startup founder and co-founder. Of course there's always the micro-failures, but one of those organizations ended up not working. We ended up having to shut down the business. One of the key learning experiences there for me was it was a bit lonely in that CEO role. I was trying to manage and motivate a lot of people through a series of challenges that I wasn't sure in myself if we were going to be able to get through. That's one of the things that I've taken away and helped to bring into some of my coaching work. There are a lot of things when you're making some of those hard calls, whether it's to hire or fire or invest or divest or sell the business, whatever those things are. They're extremely difficult decisions and sometimes it can be really lonely not having resources that can help you think that through. You can be more confident and comfortable, even if it's a challenging or negative outcome, more confident and comfortable executing that.
What inspired you to write Succeeding. Stepping Up Without Stepping In It and why do you think succession planning is so important?
So I'll start with kind of the genesis of where the book came from. I was coaching probably a dozen to two dozen in completely different organizations, completely different industries, succession candidates. People who were expected to step into a C-level role, a senior VP level, owner. These were children of business owners or high performers in their organizations, where equity was likely on the table. I did eventually expand into exploring nonprofits and corporate and all of that, but the genesis was working largely with small and mid-market firms. The thing that kept coming to me was they were struggling through what they were witnessing as an emotional barrier between them and the predecessor. Ultimately there was this emotional gap. As someone who was trying to coach effectively for the people I was working with, I was looking for resources to help them navigate why that was happening and what were the tools and resources they could potentially leverage so that they can make sense of the crazy experience they were having. Nothing was out there or there was nothing that I thought was credible. Most of the resources that had been designed around succession were either for the predecessor, exiting owner, outgoing executive, or they were blog posts and articles, stuff that.
Frankly, I thought were a bit condescending to the people who were about to take on these significant roles. So I just started asking a bunch of questions from people who I knew were successors. The next thing I know, Richard, of course, I believe I cite you in the acknowledgements as someone who helped introduce me to a few folks that were great interviews and really helped to shape this research, and ultimately came away with a lot of understanding of the central challenge of succession.
That was the starting point, what we got to. If I were to take a couple of big conclusions. The first one I would throw out would be best summarized by a quote from Bobby Bowden. So for those who aren't big college football fans, Bobby Bowden had been the head football coach for Florida State for years. He was an old guy and coached a long time. Every once in a while when the team was shaky or there was a reporter who was just interested in poking the bear, they would ask when he would retire. At one point he responded ‘there's only one big event after retirement and I ain't ready for that.’ That was his answer. So when I talk to successors, I tend to narrow the entire experience for that predecessor. This is really an existential experience and once you grasp that, once you wrap your head around that, it makes a lot of sense as to why maybe some of the behaviors that predecessor's are doing aren't normal. They aren't the things you would be used to navigating because that person's genuinely going through what is a kind of an existential experience. I don't necessarily blame 'em, that would be one of the biggest conclusions to come out of all that research.
What are some of the top strategies that leaders should be employing when they start the process of succession?
Let's talk a little bit about what happens when you're a predecessor, right? If I have a business and I'm looking to retire, I only have a few options with what to do with that asset. I can sell it internally to a management team or to family or do some sort of handoff to maintain continuity. That way I can PE it right. Sell to a PE firm or external acquirer and take my money and go spend some time on a beach in Tahiti or I can shut it down. There's some more nuance there and ESOPs but bottom line, that's what you have as your option set. The first question for the predecessor is what do they actually want? And I use actually pretty intentionally here. There are some things that you'll hear. They'll say, ‘you know, I want my employees to be taken care of’ or something along those lines. But if there's, two or three multiples higher than what they were expecting to get, many predecessors will sell without worrying too much about the employees. That's not a negative. It's just I understand that there are a lot of things that can influence that decision.
So for the predecessor, it’s what do you want? And that is a harder question to answer than it may seem to be on the surface. What I've found in my interviews with predecessors and successors is if that question isn't clearly answered, everything else becomes a lot more difficult. I have stories of where there was one successor who had to negotiate his parents' divorce in order to save the business. I had an example of someone who was about to close a deal, a 10-figure deal to sell his business, and he pulled the deal two days before because he ultimately he couldn't wrap his head around not owning the company. It was so close to his identity that he just couldn't wrap his head around it. Another story where the predecessor refuses to transition because there's a majority ownership of the business and he's able to take so much cash out of it and leverage it. So put loans against the assets that he's funding a lifestyle that he knows because of the way he structured the ownership that everyone has to play by his rules. Now these are all very different approaches and thought processes. Ultimately, if you really asked those predecessors what they want, I'm not so sure any one of them could have given you a straight answer.
What advice would you give to the predecessor in succession planning?
So first, start early. One of the key insights came from a friend of mine when we were having lunch. I was telling him about this work and this research, and he asked me if I had ever read Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ On Death and Dying which talks about grief. Now, she was originally doing research on people who were going through the process of death, but that's been expanded to people who are experiencing that as maybe losing a loved one. She originally had five stages of grief, that's been expanded to seven. My friend challenged me to look through all of the work I had done and to point through the lens of grief. What I found was that every predecessor I talked to and every successor who is explaining the challenges they were having with a predecessor, you could summarize the challenge by thinking about where they were in a stage of grief. So when you're asking when do I start or how do I start as the predecessor, my recommendation is to think about what stage they might be in and do what they can to do the emotional, or spiritual, work to at least at minimum identify where they are in the grieving process. Ideally, I start working through that more intentionally because if that baggage is attached to the business transaction or the transition in any way, it tends to get messy and messy quickly. So start as early as possible, because sometimes people need several years. The ideal world is that there's a predecessor who's already gotten to that acceptance and hope stage. Not that they won't have some challenging feelings or bad days, but they're already there and then they begin the transition process.
What advice would you give to the successor in succesion planning?
I kind of write about this in one of the big chapters of the book, chapter three. That conversation is about walking the predecessor's path and really trying to help describe to that successor what it is the predecessor's experiencing. So number one, it would be that emotional intelligence piece. Understanding what it is that person is going through at a really visceral level because if you can get there, then you can understand and explain where some of the thought and decision making comes from. There's also a bit early in the book about the metaphor of washing a rental car. It's something that I candidly didn't expect to resonate as well as it did with a lot of the folks who flipped through the book. But that one really hit home for a lot of predecessors. Obviously it seems a little silly to wash rental cards. It’s not your car. You just pop in, pop out. But the metaphor is that if you care enough about the organization, even if it isn't yours, you're willing to do the hard work as if it's your own. So what I've found is predecessor-successor relationships tend to work best if that successor is willing to wash the rental car, is willing to run the business as if it's their own. If there's not a guarantee of ownership, if there's not a b-line, something on paper, anything along those lines that tends to really resonate with the predecessor, and makes that process a lot smoother.
From there, it really is about elevating your leadership capability in order to take on that role. Anyone who might end up reading the book, there's a chapter on what I call quicksand, which are just these little, potentially even invisible, traps that successors tend to fall into. Whether it's things like, what I call the student driver. Maybe they're making a bunch of rookie mistakes that we just poo-poo and we end up enabling some of those mistakes longer term because we're saying ‘oh, they're just learning the ropes.’ Meanwhile, they're making some critical judgment errors and they're not learning from them. There's one about measuring the curtains, which is a metaphor from a presidential election from years ago. The idea is, and I had a story where quite literally someone had the maintenance crew go in and measure the curtains before the predecessor was out the door. So things along those lines that we can actively do. Then there's just pure leadership skills: what are the things that you need to do to ramp up? Just like any, I don't know, 16-year-old who just got their driver's license, who really wants the keys off of mom and dad. Every successor I've ever met wants the keys to the car. What differentiates the successors who do it well versus the ones who don't, is they're willing to be humble enough and take it slow enough so they can maintain as much continuity as possible while building credibility in order to shift the organization to the vision they see.
Where do you think emotional intelligence is most important in organizational transitions?
So let me throw one thing out there quickly. One of the things that I say, that’s a bit of a provocative statement in the book, is the transaction doesn't matter. That how you rate the contract, how you rate the equity transfer, how you do stock appreciation, whatever the transition looks like, that the transaction doesn't matter. I say that provocatively because ultimately, when you get it down on paper and you get all the lawyers to draft it up, a transaction is a symbol of what you wanted. The thing you were transacting to look like is just a symbol and that is like any other buying or selling decision, an emotional decision in its core. I have a chapter in the book about if you're going to do a succession plan and do it well, you need to take control as successor. Here's point-by-point how to do it. It has a playbook for the tactical parts of managing a succession process. So I want to set that aside 'cause it's super important, you still need to do it right, the process still matters
At the EQ level, I would say that it's when you're looking at the things that can trip you up. The way that I describe it in the book is that they're wildfires. You have sparks, things that the predecessor or the successor does, typically within their control, though not always, and the conditions where those sparks fall. So the conditions: how the predecessor's feeling in that moment are the seven stages of grief. The sparks are things you may again, may or may not be aware of as a successor. One of the things I describe as the exit iceberg, which is, the things that may be driving decision making for predecessors. The thing that's on the table, pretty obvious is interest. So there are three I-words. So there's self-interest: What are the things that they want? Do they want money? Do they want power and influence in the community? For instance, a lot of business leaders also have Board positions and things that are just of influence in their place. So there's that self-interest, then there's identity. Identity is a bit challenging because some of it's on the table and some of it might not be visible or it might take some digging for you to uncover.
Then the bottom is the instinct and that's just like connecting the dots on what's happening. Maybe they're connecting the wrong dots. The predecessor may see two or three behaviors, turn it into a story that's not true, and that in itself turns into a wildfire. That is what I'm talking about, emotional intelligence. Typically, if you're a successor, that predecessor is often a mentor or someone that you've really relied on over the years for their judgment in their expertise. Then all of a sudden they get wobbly. They start making decisions you don't understand. They start to shift in ways that you're not comfortable with and then you start having to rethink the whole relationship. And so what you're hearing through that is as the successor. It's really important for you to be able to understand that predecessor's going through something and that you may need to give them some grace. Even if it feels like you shouldn't have to, even if that violates your sense of justice, or like, ‘I shouldn't have to, mom should be able to figure this out’ or ‘Dad should be able to figure this out.’ Well, they're in a pretty significant emotional experience. They may not be able to in that moment. As a leader, you may need to take more of the control in that role. Those are the kind of things that I have seen when successors have done it well. They've been able to navigate that while still allowing that predecessor to go through the process with comfort and dignity, and walk out of it feeling very good about the transition.
Have you seen an evolution in the skills required to hold these leadership roles?
There's some stuff that's just timeless. Treating people well would be a good example of a good timeless, leadership skill. Communication, effective communication, and being proactive and listening appropriately. All those things, those are evergreen. To your question, how has leadership changed and how do we tee ourselves up for the future? I don't think the emotional intelligence piece of this conversation goes away anytime soon. The reason is that is, as we start to offload technical capability to either automation or AI tools. We need to be able to drive results by inspiring people and having them excited about the process. Then you add some of the generational transitions that come into play as well. We're starting to see some research, early research into Gen Z coming into the workforce, and some of their general lack of engagement. A thing that we've heard in a lot of our research to this point. The extent to which Gen Z has a level of flexibility that, for some earlier generations would be almost mind blowing. Those dynamics are absolutely on the table. As leaders, it's our job to adapt to the people who are following or we could think we're a leader, but if we don't have anyone behind us, we're just a solo PR practitioner, right? So leadership in that case is really about being able to take that new information and adapt. You see things like return to office and all these different types of policies that are starting to spark debates. I think every organization’s policies are different, but the bottom line is being able to hit that sweet spot between what the organization needs and what employees are looking for. Making sure you're minimizing turnover and some of those costly costs in the process.
Let's go a little pop culture, did the show Succession impact your business?
So I addressed that directly in the book. I intentionally did not watch the show so that it wouldn't overly influence anything I wrote. Now, I think part of the reason why the show is so compelling is because the rough data shows there are 10,000 baby boomers a day reaching retirement age. Interestingly between 2024 and 2027, we're at quote unquote peak boomer. So 11,500 are reaching retirement age in this three-year period a day. So it's almost hard to fathom that in a year, you would essentially wipe out the entire workforce in the state of Arizona with the number of retirements that are happening in the United States per year. Like the entire workforce of a fairly significant, pretty decently sized state in the United States, right? This transition is not optional. It is happening. I think Succession as the show, one of the reasons why it was so compelling is because it's a big part of people's lives. They know someone who's going through the process or their business is going through the process or whatever. From what I have seen of the show, it is, obviously pretty dramatic, but not as extremely crazy as you might expect it to be compared to some of the real life scenarios I encountered.
What legacy do you want to leave as a leader?
One of the things we do, in fact, you know this well, is strategic planning. My wife, who is a physician and in her health system, they are starting a residency program and she's a key part of that. She works a lot hours and does a lot of really hard work. I work in consulting, so obviously some dynamics there. We tend to be people who are just putting one step in front of the other. We discussed over the last summer that we didn't feel like we had enough direction. So we did, what I've done for a bunch of companies, was we did a weekend retreat and we did a strategic plan for us to answer that exact question. One of the surprises that came out of that discussion was, how it was important to both of us to be useful and to be valuable to people. Frankly, where I get tripped up with using my time or how I spend my time, is that doing things in pursuit of being useful. That was a real lightbulb moment for both of us. I don't think we realized the extent to which we felt that was such a driver. So when I think about legacy and what kind of leadership I want to leave behind. I want people to have felt that if they've worked with me, that I have challenged them significantly and pushed the right buttons to help them identify challenge areas and to get better. I would hope that I have been a good sounding board, even if I'm providing feedback that isn't exactly what you wanted to hear in that moment. Ultimately I drove to a conclusion that you were happy with and overall, I was useful to the people I work with. I think that's really important to me. Ultimately, if we had a funeral tomorrow, that’s the thing I would hope people would say about me in my absence.
What is the usual succession experience? Is there a 'normal' transition?
In all of the interviews I've done, I talked one-on-one with more than a hundred folks, plus the consulting work and all of the secondary research, all of that. I have one example in all of that time, where it wasn't quote-unquote weird. That one situation was the father who owned and ran the business. He had gotten some bad news about his wife, and that she was dying of a terminal illness. He was fiercely dedicated to her. Made the decision overnight that he was going to hand the business to his daughter and he was not going to be engaged that day forward, unless there was an emergency or something that daughter might need to give him a quick call about. He was completely out and did that without reservation or hesitation. The daughter came in and ran the business incredibly effectively overnight. The transition was almost seamless which is very rare with three years of planning, let alone a Friday to Monday.
That one always stuck out to me because it's either really hard or you have such an earthquake life event that the decision becomes automatic. So if there's not an earthquake like life event, it's probably going to be a slog. My goal was to provide some thoughts and ideas and structures, that and research to help validate why it's hard and give a path forward to make it so much easier on successors so that we preserve those businesses. There is trillions of wealth that is risk in this transition because these businesses need to be led by new people and at a global or a national, or however you want to think about it, perspective. To be competitive. Those small businesses and medium sized businesses need to continue, to be effective and to employ people. If we don't make those transitions easier, all of that is at risk. Our livelihoods are at risk. that's I guess maybe a little bit more philosophical than you might have expected, but I think at a core level, it's something that's really important to the process.