The Succession Tax
The Succession Tax
When is enough, enough? On recognition, longevity, and the leaders who cannot find the exit, and what their staying costs the people waiting behind them.
Walk into almost any nursing conference and look closely at the program. Scan the keynotes, the award recipients, the panel moderators, the board rosters printed on the back page. Then pull a program from ten years ago and lay the two side by side. In too many rooms, the names have not changed. The photos have been updated. The titles have grown longer. The people have not moved.
This is not an essay against experience. Experience is one of the most valuable things a profession can hold. It is an essay about what happens when experience stops being something we share and becomes something we occupy. It is about the moment a seat at the table quietly turns into a throne, and about who pays when that happens.
Longevity Is Not the Problem
Let me be clear about what I am not saying. A long career is not a character flaw. Leaders who have given thirty or forty years to this profession carried it through staffing crises, pandemics, policy fights, and institutional indifference. Many of them built the very structures the rest of us now stand on. That work deserves honor, and honor is not a small thing.
The problem is not how long someone stays. The problem is how they stay. There is a difference between a leader who remains in the room to open doors and a leader who remains in the room to hold them shut. One is stewardship. The other is occupation. From the outside they can look identical: the same name on the letterhead, the same face at the podium. From the inside, from the vantage point of the people waiting, they feel nothing alike.
Stewardship keeps the door open behind you. Occupation keeps your hand on the handle.
Naming the Cost
I have written before about the taxes nursing quietly levies on its own people: the translation tax paid by those who code-switch across worlds, the innovation tax paid by those who try to build something new inside systems designed to resist it. There is another one, and it may be the most expensive of all. I call it the succession tax: the cost absorbed by an entire generation of emerging leaders when those ahead of them refuse to make room.
It is paid in deferred development, when capable nurses spend a decade as "rising stars" because the sky above them is already full. It is paid in lost talent, when the most ambitious among them stop waiting and take their energy to industry, to startups, to other fields entirely, and the profession never learns what it lost. It is paid in stale thinking, when the same small circle sets the agenda year after year and mistakes its own comfort for consensus. And it is paid in trust, because every young nurse who watches the same people rotate through the same seats learns a lesson no leadership curriculum intended to teach: that the table is not actually open.
The cruelest part of the succession tax is that it is rarely charged on purpose. Very few leaders wake up intending to block anyone. They simply never leave, and the blocking happens on its own.
Recognition as Appetite
Recognition deserves its own honest look, because it is where the problem is easiest to see and hardest to talk about.
Recognition is meant to be a marker, a moment where a community says this mattered. But in some corners of our profession it has become an appetite. The same individuals appear on award lists again and again. Nomination committees are staffed by prior recipients who nominate their peers, who later return the favor. Lifetime achievement honors are given to people who then show no sign of letting the lifetime part conclude. The recognition economy starts to feed on itself, and the circle it rewards gets smaller and more familiar every year.
I say this with full awareness of the credentials that follow my own name. Every one of us who has been honored carries a responsibility with it. The question is not whether we have been recognized. The question is what we do with the platform recognition gives us. A fellowship, an award, a title: each one is a microphone. We can keep talking into it, or we can hand it to someone who has not yet been heard.
Recognition should be a bridge you build for others to cross, not a room you keep adding onto.
Why Leaders Stay
It would be easy to write this as an indictment and stop there. That would be dishonest, because the reasons leaders overstay are deeply human.
For many, identity and title fused long ago. After decades of being the person, stepping aside can feel less like a transition and more like disappearing. Some carry a genuine fear that the work will be undone without them, that the next generation lacks the scars required to protect what was built. Others have simply never been shown an exit. Our profession is remarkably good at onboarding leaders and remarkably poor at helping them land. We have residencies for new graduates and succession plans for almost nothing else.
Institutions share the blame. Organizations reward the familiar name because it is safe. Boards reappoint the same members because recruiting new ones takes effort. Funders favor established figures because their names reduce perceived risk. The system does not merely tolerate overstaying. In many places, it quietly incentivizes it.
Understanding all of this does not excuse it. It does explain why good people end up standing in doorways they once promised to hold open.
What Stepping Aside Actually Looks Like
Stepping aside is not the same as stepping away. Nobody is asking seasoned leaders to vanish. The profession needs their memory, their networks, and their hard-won judgment. What it needs is for those gifts to be redeployed, moved from the center of the stage to the wings, where they can make other people's performances stronger.
In practice, that can look like co-chairing before chairing, and then handing over the gavel entirely. It can look like answering an invitation to keynote with, "I will do it if I can bring someone to share the stage," or better yet, "I am not the right voice for this one, but I know who is." It can look like writing term limits into bylaws that never had them. It can look like nominating someone for the award you would have been a lock to win. It can look like an emeritus role that is genuinely active: advisory, available, and invested, without holding the vote.
The best leaders I have known treated their own departure as a leadership act. They planned for it. They announced it early. They built the bench deliberately and then trusted it. They understood that the final measure of any leader is not what they built while they held the chair, but what continues to thrive after they leave it.
A Word to Those Waiting
To the emerging leaders reading this: do not wait for permission that may never arrive. If the table is full, build another one. Start the council, launch the initiative, write the piece, form the network. Some of the most important structures in nursing were built by people who got tired of standing in line.
And when you arrive, remember how the waiting felt. Honor those who came before you without being governed by them. Learn from their experience without inheriting their grip. Because one day, sooner than you imagine, someone will be standing behind you, and the question of when enough is enough will belong to you.
Enough is not a verdict on your worth. It is the last and most generous thing a leader can give: room for someone else to become one.
Prepared by: Ali R. Tayyeb, PhD, RN, NPD-BC, PHN, FADLN, FAAN
