JC: The greatest gift a leader gives to its organization is how you leave.
FH: Yes. I think from the day we go into the job, we start thinking about how and when we will leave because it isn’t about us, it’s how we are going to leave that organization, that institution, the enterprise.
And all along the way—and this isn’t a public pronouncement, this is very internal and very personal—and so we have goals for the organization, you have, where you hope that marvelous, wonderful organization will move and you keep testing it along the way. Now it doesn’t mean you don’t shift your gears because when I took the job, I anticipated being there three years and I left thirteen years later but all the time I kept thinking, ‘when should I leave, when is the right time?’
And so on January 31st, 1989 I said to the National Board and the national staff, ‘In exactly one year from today I’m going to leave and together we will build the most remarkable example, model of leadership transition, the country has ever seen.’ And so, we developed it, it had four phases it was everybody’s baby, it wasn’t just my leaving and my last year, was the most exuberant year of my thirteen years. And that’s what every leader should be able to say. And yet we look out there, the landscape of corporate America or the other two sectors we see littered with careers of leaders who didn’t know when or how to leave, so that’s a leadership imperative.