Succession Is the Most Accurate Portrayal of What Happens When Succession Planning Is Treated as a Power Game

Succession, the HBO series that ran from 2018 to 2023, is the most accurate portrayal of what happens to an organisation when succession planning is treated as a power game rather than a strategic necessity. It is also, incidentally, excellent television. But for an HR professional or a CHRO watching it with a practitioner’s eye, the experience is less like entertainment and more like a four-season case study in the consequences of a specific and common organisational pathology: the founding CEO who cannot let go, the talent architecture that was never built, and the board that substituted access for governance.

I want to be precise about the claim I am making. I am not saying that Succession is a cautionary tale about rich people behaving badly, though it is certainly that. I am saying that the Roy family’s dysfunction is not incidental to the story. It is the story, and it is the story in ways that have direct analogs in organisations that do not own media empires and do not have children called Kendall and Siobhan. The mechanisms of the dysfunction, the founder’s unwillingness to actually transfer power, the siblings’ competition for approval rather than capability, the board’s conflation of proximity with competence, these are not Hollywood inventions. They are documented organisational failure modes.

Logan Roy is not a villain in the conventional sense. He is a brilliantly drawn version of a type that HR professionals and board advisors encounter regularly: the highly capable founding leader whose identity is so thoroughly fused with the organisation that the act of succession feels, at a deep psychological level, not like a strategic transition but like an annihilation.

The behaviours that Logan exhibits across four seasons are not random expressions of malice. They are the consistent, predictable outputs of a founder who has never allowed the organisation to develop a genuine succession architecture because doing so would require him to confront the limits of his own permanence. EVERY TIME A POTENTIAL SUCCESSOR SHOWS ENOUGH STRENGTH TO BE CREDIBLE, LOGAN DESTABILISES THEM. Not because they are inadequate, though he will frame it that way, but because their adequacy is threatening.

This is the most common and most costly succession failure mode in founder-led organisations. The succession planning process exists on paper. The board is reassured annually that it is progressing. The HR function produces a talent map that shows credible internal candidates with development plans. But the actual power dynamics of the organisation systematically prevent any of those candidates from building the credibility, the experience, and the external recognition that genuine succession readiness requires.

In Succession, this plays out in vivid, operatic detail. But strip away the wealth, the drama, and the wit of the writing, and what remains is a pattern that I have observed in the advisory room more than once: a CEO who says he wants a successor and whose behaviour, in every specific instance where a succession-relevant decision needs to be made, ensures that no one gets close enough to succeed him.

The three Roy children who compete for the succession throughout the series, Kendall, Siobhan, and Roman, are not incompetent people. Each of them demonstrates, at various points in the series, genuine capability: strategic insight, operational competence, interpersonal intelligence, political acuity. The problem is that none of their capability was ever developed in a structured way, and none of it was ever assessed against a clear standard of succession readiness.

Their development, such as it was, happened through a process of competing for Logan’s approval and favour, which is a development process that produces a very specific and dysfunctional set of competencies. It produces people who are skilled at reading a powerful individual’s preferences and calibrating their own position accordingly. It produces people who are adept at coalition-building within a specific political environment. And it produces people who are fundamentally unable to lead without the reference point of the patriarch’s approval, because the approval was always the goal, not the leadership itself.

THIS IS NOT JUST A FAMILY SYSTEM PROBLEM. It is a talent development problem. In any organisation where the primary development mechanism is proximity to a powerful leader and the management of that leader’s perception, the talent that emerges will be shaped by that mechanism. The skills that are rewarded are the skills of political navigation. The skills that are underdeveloped are the skills of independent strategic judgement, because independent strategic judgement is threatening to the leader whose approval is the primary currency.

The board of Waystar Royco, as depicted in Succession, is a study in the governance failure that enables the succession pathology. The board members are not oblivious to Logan’s behaviour. Several of them are clearly aware that the succession is not progressing as announced. But the board’s primary relationship to Logan is one of proximity and access rather than independent oversight, and that relationship makes the governance intervention that the succession situation requires structurally difficult.

The independence problem in real boards is rarely as dramatic as the Roy family scenario. But the pattern is recognisable. A founding CEO who has been on the board as executive chairman, or who has appointed a significant proportion of the non-executive directors over time, or who has built a culture in which board meetings are informational events rather than governance events, produces a board that has the structural capacity to oversee the succession but not the cultural capacity to exercise it.

The succession question that boards need to ask, and that the Waystar board consistently fails to ask with genuine force, is not “is the succession plan in place?” It is “is the CEO’s behaviour, in specific and observable ways, actually consistent with the succession plan that has been communicated to us?” The first question can be answered by producing a document. The second question requires the board to exercise the kind of independent analytical rigour that is only available to a board that has not confused access for governance.

There are five things that Succession gets precisely right about succession as an organisational process, and I want to be specific about each of them.

First, the series accurately captures the difference between a succession announcement and a succession commitment. Logan announces successors repeatedly. The announcements are real in the sense that they are genuinely made. But the commitment to follow through on the announcement is never present, and the difference between the announcement and the commitment is where most real-world succession processes break down.

Second, the series accurately depicts how the succession vacuum produces political behaviour that destroys the very candidates it is drawing in. Each of the Roy children becomes a worse leader over the course of the series, not a better one, because the succession competition is selecting for political survival rather than leadership capability. THIS IS THE MOST DIRECTLY GENERALISABLE FINDING FOR REAL ORGANISATIONS: a poorly structured succession process does not just fail to identify the right successor; it actively degrades the capability of the people it is nominally developing.

Third, the series correctly shows that the eventual successors, both internal and external, are shaped by the system they inherit rather than transforming it. Tom Wambsgans, who ends the series in the CEO role, is himself a product of the same political survival game that defined the Roy siblings. The system produces its own perpetuation.

Fourth, the series accurately portrays the cost to the organisation’s external credibility of a protracted and visible succession crisis. The Waystar stock price and the board’s relationship with institutional investors are running commentary throughout the series on the organisational cost of the succession failure. The series is right that this cost is real and material, and that boards that allow the succession pathology to persist are bearing a significant shareholder value cost for a governance failure that is, in principle, their responsibility to address.

Fifth, and most importantly for practitioners: the series accurately shows that the succession conversation that actually needs to happen between the incumbent CEO and the board is almost never the one that actually takes place. The gap between what is said in the boardroom and what is true is the most costly gap in the succession process, and Succession dramatises that gap with a precision that years of governance research has been unable to achieve.