Leaders don’t build pipelines. They carry posses

Every corporate brochure hums the same hymn: we develop leaders.

Succession plans mapped on nine-box grids. Talent factories churning out the next CEO like a conveyor belt. HR executives speaking of pipelines as if they were oil barons of potential.

But walk inside most executive suites and the myth collapses. The “pipeline” is dry. The future, unplumbed. The high-gloss programs produce slide decks, not successors.

Leaders don’t leave pipelines. They leave shadows. And the only people who reliably step into those shadows are the ones already standing there.

The reality of the posse

A true leader doesn’t drag around a pipe full of anonymous candidates. They carry a posse.

Not a committee. Not a spreadsheet. A posse.

A handful of lieutenants who fought beside them in earlier campaigns, through a turnaround that nearly bankrupted the company, through an acquisition that could have sunk careers, through a market push where failure meant humiliation in the press.

These are not abstract “talents.” They are comrades tested under fire. Trusted precisely because their flaws are known, their limits exposed, and still - they did not buckle.

A posse is forged in battle, not in classrooms.

The rules of the posse

The contract is never spoken, but it is understood.

• Stand when the pressure crushes.

• Deliver when the stakes spike.

• Keep silence outside the tent.

Flaws can be forgiven. Betrayal cannot. A résumé will never outweigh the memory of someone who held the line at midnight.

And so the posse travels with its leader. From one job to the next, from company to company. Until one of three things happens:

They stumble on new terrain.

They peel away for their own command.

Or they break faith, and the circle closes without them.

How the posse grows

When the posse thins, leaders do not consult HR grids. They ask a single question of their lieutenants: Who would you vouch for?

Vouching, not process, is the currency. One tested fighter names another. One ally smuggles in a new recruit.

And thus the circle replenishes - not by assessment centres or glossy “high potential” lists, but by whispered guarantees: He’ll hold. She won’t fold.

This is how posses endure.

The cost of posse leadership

To outsiders, it looks like a clique. And they are not wrong. Posses can calcify into closed shops, where the same loyalists rotate through roles like actors recycling parts in a tired play.

Diversity of thought suffers when every hire is “someone vouched for.” Innovation dulls when trust becomes the only qualification.

But leadership is not a philosophy seminar. It is trench work. And when the shelling starts, most leaders would rather turn to the fighter they know than gamble on the glowing résumé they don’t.

Certainty of trust outweighs the promise of potential.

The simple truth

Leadership is not a factory line. It is a posse, carried from one frontier to the next.

Your true legacy is not how many talent reviews you chaired, or how many pastel-coloured succession charts you left behind.

It is simpler, harsher, more honest:

Who would still follow you into the next fight?

That, and nothing else, is leadership.