Across
- 2. The quality required to build something you won't be around to enjoy and to prepare a future you'll only watch from the sidelines.
- 4. The arrival of a new approach that breaks the old patterns, sometimes best delivered by an outsider who never absorbed the comfortable assumptions.
- 6. Describing the kind of knowledge that everyone relies on but nobody wrote down, the instinct and feel that lives quietly inside an expert.
- 8. The continuous flow of people being developed and readied for greater responsibility, so that talent arrives before the need does rather than after it.
- 9. The whole process of preparing for and managing the transfer of a role or responsibility from one person to the next, ideally long before anyone actually leaves.
- 11. Touching the deepest questions of meaning, mortality, and significance, which is why imagining your own replacement unsettles people so profoundly.
- 13. The person who takes over the role, who needs to inherit not just the authority but, as our guest argued, the entire story.
- 15. The comforting fake reason your mind manufactures to justify doing what you already wanted to do, dressed up to look like sound judgment.
- 18. The somewhat counterintuitive goal a wise leader works toward, in which the organization eventually needs them less and less rather than more.
- 19. The experienced person who guides a less experienced one, passing on the unwritten instincts that no handbook could ever fully capture.
- 20. Describing an assignment deliberately set slightly beyond someone's current comfort, the precise condition under which real leaders are actually grown.
Down
- 1. The flattering but dangerous quality of being so necessary that everything falls apart without you, which usually means you've built something far too fragile.
- 3. To ceremonially and almost reverently designate someone as the chosen successor, often with a faint air of ritual that may outrun actual merit.
- 5. The actual ability to do the hard things a role demands, as opposed to merely occupying the box on the chart where that work is supposed to happen.
- 7. What remains of your work and influence after you're gone, the answer to whether anything you built is still standing a year later.
- 10. To hand a genuine responsibility, with real stakes attached, to someone else and then have the discipline to stop hovering over them.
- 12. The hard-won, unspoken sense of when to push and when to wait that the article insisted simply cannot be transferred in a document.
- 14. The unbroken carrying-on of something across a change of leadership, which the article argued isn't always as obviously desirable as we assume.
- 16. Bottomlessly, dramatically terrible, far beyond merely poor, the kind of bad that earns its theatrical edge.
- 17. What happens to a skill, a relationship, or an ambition when it's left unused for too long, slowly withering away from sheer neglect.