For several years, this worked reasonably well. Luke sold. I ran. Victor presided. We had overlapping responsibilities only at the edges, and at the edges we managed.
What changed was Victor’s retirement planning.
He was sixty-four when he first mentioned it explicitly, two years before the conference room meeting. He wanted to step back. He wanted family succession. He had two children in the company and he had decided, somewhere in the architecture of his assumptions about leadership, that his son was his successor.
Luke is better at certain things than I am. The presentation, the relationship opener, the pitch. I am better at other things. I expected Victor to see both sets of things, add them together, and construct something that used both of us. I expected this for longer than I’m comfortable admitting.
What he constructed instead was a succession plan where Luke would take point on everything — accounts, operations, carrier relationships — and I would continue in some supporting capacity that was never clearly defined.
“Supporting capacity” was what I got when I asked directly, two months before the conference room meeting, during a conversation at my parents’ house after Sunday dinner. I said I wanted to understand how my role would change as Luke took on more. My mother was in the kitchen. Victor said something about “leveraging your strengths in a support function.” I asked what that meant. He said they’d work it out.
They worked it out by eliminating the role.
Luke, to his credit, did make an effort in those first weeks after his promotion was announced internally. He sat with me twice, asking about the major accounts, taking notes on a pad he’d bought specifically for the purpose. He asked about Alder. I told him about the quarterly review process, the exception protocols, the way Diane preferred to receive status updates.