Leadership Outlasts Leaders - A Lesson from Liverpool

How Elite Leaders Create Sustainable Excellence That Survives Transitions

The Legacy

Each morning walking, through Liverpool FC’s training facility at Melwood, I passed a Champions League trophy on my left.

On my right I passed a large mural above that read …

"Above all, I would like to be remembered as a man who was selfless, who strove and worried so that others could share the glory, and who built up a family of people who could hold their heads up high and say …

'We are Liverpool'".

 - Bill Shankly

Every time CEOs bring up the question of making changes this image springs to mind. It epitomizes the balance of leadership – results and success on once side, vision and legacy on the other. The Liverpool experience was the same I had walking into the San Francisco 49ers' training facility each morning. Super Bowl trophies at an address that reads 4949 Marie P. DeBartolo Way. Success on one side, family legacy on another.

Many directors, CEOs worry that despite exceptional performance, changes or departures will trigger decline—that the culture they’ve developed are perhaps too dependent on personal leadership.

I've seen this challenge across many elite environments. In sports organizations, I’ve seen how some programs thrive across multiple coaching changes, internal and external, while others collapsed when successful leaders departed.

The difference isn't luck however - it’s leadership systems.

The Succession Paradox

Here's the counterintuitive reality about elite leadership:

The most successful leaders make themselves ultimately unnecessary.

Think back to when you were at school. The best teachers don’t juts teach you, they inspired and taught you to learn and teach yourself, without them.

Same with great CEOs, they build organizational cultures that exceed their personal contributions They create systems that enable sustained excellence - regardless of individual leadership changes.

The reality that most miss is that it isn't about diminishing their or others current impact - it's about multiplying the long-term influence through a culture of leadership development.

5 Keys To Elite Legacy System

The most successful leaders I've coached approach succession not as a singular event, but as an ongoing process and a habit:

1.  System-Dependent vs. Leader-Dependent

Elite leaders identify which organizational habits and behaviors depend on their personal involvement and methodically turn those into systems and processes.

2.  Leadership Multiplication

Instead of developing single successors, elite performers create multiple leaders – all capable of continuing organizational excellence. They build leadership depth, not just leadership replacement.

3.  Culture DNA

Elite leaders document or at a minimum verbalize the cultural keys that drive their organization's success. This ensures they can be communicated and handed down across leadership transitions.

4.  Knowledge Transfer

Rather than fearfully hoarding institutional knowledge, elite leaders are not scared. They create methods for rapid knowledge transfer. They ensure critical knowledge survives changes or departures.

5.  Evolution Preparation

Elite legacy leaders don't just preserve the status quo or try to preserve current success—they actually build for continued evolution and improvement beyond their tenure. They like Shankly, Bill Walsh and other great coaches build for a vision greater than themselves.

The Championship Transition Model

In elite sports, I've been part of programs that maintained championship standards across multiple coaching changes and consulted for many others, one NFL team for example across three different leadership changes.

The difference between good and bad ones?

Successful transitions shared common characteristics: strong leadership development as a core philosophy, systematic process documentation, and a strong cultural preservation that mitigated any single individual.

The mistake that many leaders get wrong is they focus on just one of these – not recognizing the synergy and relationship between all three, together.

Once legendary rugby organization I was fortunate to be part of maintained its excellence across five different head coaches because each leader understood the greater legacy of the organization and focused on continuing the program development, not just only achieving immediate results.

The Institutional Knowledge

In contrast, the worst organizational leaders are the insecure ones – the ones who are so self-conscious and fearful of ‘losing control’, that they hoard information or insight, worry that developing others will be threat to their position or undermine them.

Elite leaders understand however that their greatest legacy isn't personal achievement in and of itself but achievement that’s only possible through an organization and that’s impossible without others. They create an organizational “Bank of Wisdom” if you will, that enables future achievements. They build learning systems, these capture insights that drive sustained excellence.

This requires security in one’s ability, security in one’s mission and disciplined knowledge sharing combined with deliberate development of others that persists beyond their own wins.

ADL

The phrase I use with CEOs and MDs consistently is ADL – Always Developing Leaders. The best organizations have a mindset engrained that leadership is a quality, not a role or title.

Every day, task and event is a moment to be used to develop leadership in others. The natural consequence is of course of great advantage - decentralized thinking, creativity, innovation and problem solving.  

 

The best leaders develop leaders who can exceed their own achievements.

The best leaders are not just developing successors—they develop leaders who can exceed their own achievements. They create organizational cultures that enable future leaders to reach heights that wouldn't have been possible without the systems they've built.

The Strategic Investment

Many organizations allocate significant set time and resources to succession development, or leadership training. But they treat it as a current performance task, not a systemic organizational quality. Legacy building isn’t a once off, it’s cultural, it requires the same approach as any other organizational quality.

What I’m describing isn’t succession planning in the usual traditional sense that mediocre organizations refer to — it's leadership excellence that ensures organizational succession continues – and your company keeps advancing regardless of leadership changes.

The Influence Multiplication

Leaders who build lasting dominant organizations don't just influence their current tenure—they influence every future leader who benefits from the culture.

Their impact multiplies.

The Legacy Paradox

In elite leadership, your greatest achievement isn't what you accomplish during your period —it's what your organization accomplishes beyond you also. Leaders who master succession excellence don't just create successful organizations; they create successful organizational futures.

Great organizations and great leaders don’t simply have one-off wins, they sustain success over a long period of time.

Like the entrance at Liverpool this sustained success is built on ... Success on one side and Succession on the other.