Firms talk about recruiting far more than they talk about succession. The result is a generation of strong technical managers with no clear route into business leadership, and a generation of practice leaders with no obvious successor. Both sides are usually waiting for the other one to start the conversation.
AEC firms spend a great deal of time talking about recruiting.
They spend much less time talking about succession. In this market, succession is the harder problem.
Consider the environmental manager who has spent fifteen or twenty years becoming the person everyone relies on. She understands the technical work. She knows the regulatory side cold — SEQR and NEPA, permitting, the agency review process, the timelines that actually hold and the ones that never do. She has credibility with NYSDOT, DASNY, with other state agencies, with municipal clients. She mentors the younger engineers, gets pulled into the difficult project problems, and shows up more and more often in proposals and client meetings.
Then what?
The next step, in most firms, is Practice Leader or Director. And firms routinely treat that promotion as the next rung on the same ladder.
It isn’t the next rung. It’s a different ladder.
This isn’t specific to environmental practices, incidentally. The same story runs through a transportation group, a structures department, a water and wastewater practice. Wherever a firm’s reputation rests on one exceptional technical leader, the same two questions are sitting there unasked: what happens when that person is ready for more, and what happens when that person is gone.
What actually changes at the practice level
A department manager is accountable for technical quality and project delivery. Those are demanding responsibilities, and someone who does them well for two decades earns every bit of the respect that comes with it.
A practice leader is accountable for something else.
- Building and holding a team together
- Developing the technical leaders who come next
- Owning the client relationships rather than supporting them
- Winning work, not just delivering it
- Utilization, backlog, multipliers, margin
- Deciding where the practice should invest and where it shouldn’t compete
- Identifying who will eventually do this job instead of you
- Holding the technical standards that built the reputation in the first place.
Only one item on that list has anything to do with the technical work that got the person there.
This is where firms lose people. A talented manager looks at the practice leader’s job, sees no path into it that anyone has described out loud, and concludes there isn’t one. That is a retention problem before it is ever a succession problem, and firms tend to discover it in the wrong order.
What the firm owes the successor
Succession planning should start well before the current practice leader names a retirement date. A few things make the difference.
Give them exposure to the business.
Not another technical meeting. Staffing decisions, forecasting, strategic planning, conversations about profitability. The business is learned by being in the room while it is being run.
Transfer client relationships deliberately.
If one senior leader owns the firm’s most important agency relationships, that is organizational risk sitting on a single person’s calendar. Bring the next leader into those relationships while the incumbent is still there to lend credibility and context. A relationship handed over at a retirement dinner has not been transferred.
Make them responsible for developing people.
A future practice leader shouldn’t just be the firm’s best problem solver. They need to show they can create more problem solvers. That takes a couple of years to demonstrate, which is exactly why it can’t wait until the transition is underway.
Let them help decide where the practice grows.
Which services should expand. Which public-sector clients to pursue. Which positions to add, and when. Those decisions teach someone to think like an owner rather than a department manager, and there is no substitute for having actually made a few of them.
Talk about succession out loud.
If a strong environmental manager can’t see a route to leadership inside the firm, eventually another firm will show them one. Firms are often reluctant to name a successor because naming one disappoints everyone else. That is a real concern, but it is a smaller concern than losing the person.
What the manager has to ask for
There is another side to this, and it gets discussed far less.
If you are the environmental manager who wants to run the practice, don’t assume leadership knows that. And don’t wait for someone to decide you’re ready.
Ask to be included.
Ask to sit in on the annual planning and forecasting discussions. Ask your practice leader to walk you through how the group actually makes money — not how a project gets budgeted, but how utilization, backlog, hiring and margin move the decisions. Ask to go along to important client meetings when there isn’t a problem to solve. Volunteer for a strategic pursuit from the go/no-go through the interview. Take responsibility for developing a promising project manager.
And have the direct conversation:
“I’d like to lead a practice like this eventually. What experience am I missing, and what can I take responsibility for over the next twelve to twenty-four months to prepare for it?”
That is a different question from “what do I need to do to get promoted.”
One asks about a title. The other asks for the work that earns it.
There is a second benefit to asking. You will find out whether your firm sees the same future for you that you see for yourself. That answer is worth knowing, whichever direction it points.
The questions your leader has to answer that you don’t
If you want a quick test of how far you are from the job, look at the questions that land on your practice leader’s desk and never on yours.
- Do we add a position now, or wait another quarter to see the backlog?
- Which clients should we invest in, and which are we carrying?
- Why did we pursue this project and pass on that one?
- Where are our margins being squeezed?
- Who isn’t ready for the next level, and what are we doing about it?
- What happens to our backlog if a major program slips a year?
Those are leadership questions. Start learning to answer them before anyone gives you the title, and the title stops being the thing that changes you.
Both directions
Succession works when it runs both ways. Firms deliberately build the people who will run the place next. Ambitious managers deliberately build themselves and say so out loud.
When only one side is doing the work, the result is predictable. A practice leader retires with the client relationships still in his head. Or a talented manager takes a director title at another firm, and everyone at the first firm says they had no idea he was looking.
Both of those outcomes were avoidable eighteen months earlier, in a conversation neither party wanted to start.
So, two questions to end on.
- If you lead a practice: who could take your seat, and what have you actually done in the last year to get them ready
- If you want to lead one: what part of that job are you not being exposed to today — and have you asked?