Two years ago, Cezary Mączka told Pacific International that succession planning is a business imperative built on multi-year horizons. Since then, AI has begun reshaping what leaders need to be good at, and geopolitical shocks have redrawn the operating environment. Margaret Jaouadi sat down with him again to ask what still holds, what has changed, and what boards should actually do about it. Cezary is an HR & Corporate Functions Director at SPIE Central Europe, an independent European leader in multi-technical services in energy and communications within the SPIE Group, which includes 15 entities in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. His career spans GE, EDF, and Budimex across the industrial, financial services, energy, and construction sectors.
Margaret Jaouadi: When we last spoke in 2024, you described succession as a business imperative grounded in planning horizons of several years. Since then, AI has begun to reshape leadership capabilities, and geopolitical shocks have redrawn the operating environment. Has your thinking changed, and can long horizons still hold when the ground moves this fast?
Cezary Mączka: My thinking hasn’t changed at the level of principle. The list of variables has. In 2024, I described succession as a business imperative with a multi-year horizon, and I stand by that. What is different is that the horizon now has to include capabilities nobody would have flagged as critical five years ago: the ability to make decisions in partnership with AI, operational resilience against geopolitical shocks, and the capacity to reconfigure structure quickly without losing continuity. Look at what the automotive sector is going through in Europe right now to see how fast a structure can be forced to change.
Long horizons hold up well when the succession plan maps capabilities, not names attached to titles. That is how it worked at EDF in Poland, where we consolidated the competency structure from 66 roles to 16. The key was not cutting positions; that was only the outcome. The key was redesigning the capabilities the business actually needed to run for the future. Because we had done that, the people we had developed under one structure were ready to take on roles in a completely different configuration once the model changed. It was not a response to a crisis. It was an architecture that survived the next change before we even knew it was coming.
The GE Money and BPH merger, the biggest in Polish banking at the time, showed the same thing from a different angle. Companies with clarity about who had leadership potential, independent of their current title, integrated far faster than those still searching for leaders in the middle of a crisis. That was very visible when the financial crisis hit in 2008. And think about the bench GE built under Jack Welch. Setting the top job aside, people from the second tier of that race, like Nardelli and McNerney, went on to run companies in entirely different industries: Home Depot, Chrysler, 3M, Boeing. Their later records were judged very differently; some rebuilt value, some destroyed it. But the fact that they could take those roles decades later shows that good succession planning produces transferable capability, not just today’s staffing.
So I am not shortening the horizon. I am changing how often I review it and widening the set of capabilities I assess.
Margaret Jaouadi: When you start with capabilities, two things follow that matter to our clients. One is the EU pay transparency legislation, which is pushing companies to define capabilities and redesign their job architecture. The other is a debate we see every day in executive search: clients insisting on specific industry experience and refusing to look at adjacent sectors. What you are describing almost makes the industry box redundant.
Cezary Mączka: Both are true. I am a big supporter of pay transparency. It forces an external look at the resources you already have and whether you are treating them fairly. It is not rare to find two people sitting desk to desk with a salary difference of around 60%, which is absurd. It means there was never a transparent reward policy in the first place. Used well, the legislation lets you finally clean house: job grading, job valuation, a proper pay structure, real career paths, and then the gap you have to report. In some markets, there will be fines for not meeting it, so the pressure to make roles comparable will only grow.
Apart from the obvious exceptions, when it comes to a specific industry experience, insisting on it is often a mistake. Take my own path. Under the GE umbrella, I started in the industrial business, moved to the corporate centre, then into financial services. That gave me an overview of different clients, expectations, reward systems, and economics. It made me an HR leader on one side and a business leader on the other, and it let me move quickly afterwards, into energy and then construction. That variety is the best indicator of how open, how brave and how flexible a leader is, and how fast they adapt. You can teach a great deal. Being comfortable in an uncomfortable, uncertain situation is a skill in itself, and it does not carry an industry label.
Succession Planning Hesitation
Margaret Jaouadi: Despite all of this, many companies still put off honest succession conversations. Why do you think that is, and what do they actually risk by delaying, particularly now?
Cezary Mączka: Companies don’t delay out of ignorance. An honest conversation about succession carries an immediate political cost and a deferred benefit. A CEO who names a successor signals his own replaceability, and that is rarely perceived as in his interest. Some are convinced that admitting they are replaceable means admitting they are not strong enough.
In owner-led companies, a second mechanism kicks in: people are judged not on competence but on loyalty. In Poland, we have a shorthand for it: the ‘Passive, Mediocre, Loyal’ (‘Bierny, Mierny, Wierny’) formula. Where the owner is the sole judge, that formula still beats any competency scorecard.
This is not only a Polish problem. HBO did not have to invent much for the series Succession. The fight for control of a real media empire played out alongside the fiction. The difference between Logan Roy and a real chief executive is that the real world does not get four seasons to build toward a decision. The most expensive proof I know is Gucci: decades of family rivalry without agreed rules, falling brand value, and a forced sale of the family’s stake to outside investors. The company survived. The family that built it did not stay in it. The same pattern keeps recurring, closer to home in Poland too. The legal structures exist. What is missing is a shared vision before the emotions arrive.
The real point is that the risk is asymmetric. A company with no plan loses nothing until something happens, and then it loses everything at once. That asymmetry is sharper today because reaction time has shrunk. A geopolitical shock or a sudden AI-driven pressure does not give you a quarter to search calmly. It gives you weeks.
Margaret Jaouadi: Whose job is it to change that? Where does responsibility really sit, between the chief executive, the board and HR?
Cezary Mączka: For me this is not an HR responsibility. It sits squarely with the business leader. I see no difference between the basic measures a leader is accountable for: revenue, free cash flow, backlog, and succession. All of them are about foreseeing the future. If you cannot prepare the company for the hard moments ahead, you are not a responsible leader.
HR is the function equipped to walk you through the process and flag challenging moments. It is like the patient and the doctor. You have to understand you need help and be willing to knock on the door. Then the doctor can help you. But it starts with your responsibility to stay fit.
At the operational level, this gets more precise. A chief executive naturally tends to judge direct reports by how easily they work with him: loyalty, alignment, low friction. That is an assessment of comfort, not of leadership potential. HR’s job is to put a second assessment next to that one, built on different criteria: the ability to run a team, decisiveness under pressure, readiness for broader responsibility, and to present both as two honest perspectives, not as a correction. At Budimex, HR’s read on a candidate sometimes diverged from the business’s, and both versions went to the chief executive on separate slides, each with its own rationale. HR did not prevail because it argued harder. It prevailed when its case rested on firmer data, a track record of crisis decisions rather than an impression from the last quarter.
That only works when HR sits on the board rather than beneath it. HR on the board can explain, in business language, why a given director is genuinely hard to replace. HR outside the board has an advisory voice the chief executive can ignore without consequence. This is what the seat at the table really means: not the power to outvote anyone, but the right to put a version on the table that cannot be ignored. And it starts with HR understanding the business first.
Margaret Jaouadi: Turning to what good looks like, can you share an example where robust succession planning made a real difference, something that would not have happened without it?
Cezary Mączka: The clearest example I have concerns a role that formally did not exist. As HR director, I convinced the board in Madrid that Budimex needed a division director at a level we did not have, and that we already had someone inside the company ready to take it on. The role of COO was created. The person who took it is now a successful CEO.
I will not credit the whole company’s performance to one appointment; that would be dishonest. But the trajectory speaks for itself. In 2021, when the structure was created, Budimex had revenue of 7.9 billion zloty, a backlog of around 13 billion, and an EBIT margin of 7.4%. Today, it is 9.4 billion in revenue, a 16.2 billion backlog, an EBIT margin close to 9.4%, the highest in the company’s history, and a net cash position of 2.6 billion that allows the company to fund its own growth without outside capital. It remains the construction leader in Poland and one of the leaders in Central Europe.
For me, this is the whole mechanism. Good succession is not fitting a person into a ready-made position. It is recognising that a position should be built around someone’s potential before anyone else notices, and giving that person broad enough exposure to be ready. You do not see the value of that decision in one quarter. You see it four years later, when the company is still benefiting.
A Strong Pipeline Gives You a Time Option.
Margaret Jaouadi: Where succession is done well, how does it change the way an organisation copes with disruption? What does a strong pipeline let a business do that a weak one cannot?
Cezary Mączka: A strong pipeline gives you a time option. When a role opens, a company with a ready internal candidate can fill it in a week, or deliberately choose to look outside. That is a choice, not a necessity. A company without a pipeline has no choice, especially for niche technical roles. It searches under pressure, pays a higher price, and too often takes whoever is available rather than the best. You end up paying a premium for what you failed to do earlier. And this is not only about crises. Leadership roles open up constantly for entirely ordinary reasons, so a company without a system pays that cost over and over, spread across dozens of separate decisions. You can lose one person, or several at once, and that is when it really harms the business.
One myth needs to be broken here: that succession is an HR process. That is false and harmful because it lets the business off the hook. You hear it on boards all the time. Engagement scores are down; HR will fix that. No. Culture comes from the top, and culture is not a slogan; it is the behaviour a leader tolerates. Succession is the same. If you talk but do not walk the talk, you will be in trouble when something happens.
There is a practical tool that more conservative organisations underuse: market mapping with an executive search partner ahead of time, as a standing practice, not only when a role becomes vacant. It means knowing, and staying in contact with, the people in the market who could step into a key role within weeks if no internal successor were ready. That is business continuity planning, not a separate recruitment project. It gives you the same time option as a ready internal candidate, extended beyond your own walls. And it has a strategic pay-off: a board that knows it has both internal successors and a mapped external market can treat expansion or entry into a new area as a real option, because it does not have to assume months of pressured hiring in every scenario.
Margaret Jaouadi: There is a wider version of this. Should every leader, from the day they take a role, be looking for their own successor? Is that even feasible?
Cezary Mączka: I am old school about this. What I valued most in one company was a simple rule: if you wanted to be promoted, you first had to be replaceable. That removes the fear. Second, you rotated roles every three or four years. You never gave the interview answer, “I left because I got bored,” because you were never bored; you were always surviving in a new environment and proving yourself from scratch, which is exactly what the company wanted. Third, and less fashionable now but still valuable, you were expected to be genuinely skilled in structured problem-solving, Six Sigma, and lean. Picture that as a triangle: you are replaceable, you expect to move, and you carry the tools to read a new situation and make the right calls. A good friend’s daughter works at Procter & Gamble and describes the same discipline: moving teams or roles every two to three years. It keeps people agile and the work fresh. Not every company can do it, but the ones that do are building a bench without even calling it succession planning.
A Case for Succession as a Proprity
Margaret Jaouadi: When you are making the case to a sceptical board, what actually moves them from agreeing in principle to treating succession as a priority?
Cezary Mączka: I stick to cost, because numbers talk. Qualitative arguments do not move a board to a budget decision. A hard number set against a cost they already accept does.
The first layer is acquisition cost. Wharton research shows that an external hire for a senior role costs, on average, 18 to 20% more than promoting internally into the same role. That is only the starting point. The second layer is even bigger: roughly 40-50% of externally hired senior leaders are rated ineffective within their first 18 months. In most cases, the cause is not a lack of technical competence; it is cultural misalignment, which no interview process reliably catches. On top of that sits the cost of replacing a senior person, which can run to several hundred per cent of annual salary once you factor in the search, onboarding, the productivity dip during transition, and the risk of repeating the whole thing if it fails.
Put together, these change the question the board is asking. It is no longer “is it worth investing in internal development?” It becomes “what is it costing us, year after year, to keep betting on external recruitment that fails half the time?” That is the difference between a topic that gets deferred and a cost line you have to explain to shareholders. You recruit for technical skills, but you terminate for cultural and behavioural ones. So the question is not whether it is worth investing. It is what it will cost if you do not, and the external hire fails.
Margaret Jaouadi: Even the right person can struggle during transition, and the failure rate is high whether the hire is internal or external. What lets an organisation support people through that transition rather than replace them?
Cezary Mączka: I have not worked with external coaches directly, but I have seen the value of investing in people at that moment. As an outside adviser, I worked with a listed Polish company, in a region where talent was scarce, that wanted a genuine internal bench, not for the board itself but for the operational roles one layer below it, the roles that are vital to keep the business running. Because they had to attract people from other parts of the country, they built clear career paths, so the offer was not just compensation but a whole package and a future. It doubled as employer branding: a listed company wanting to be seen as modern in how it develops its teams. It cost money, and they decided it was worth it. Their basic efficiency measures are now around 15% better than when they started building that bench. I cannot name them; it is confidential, but the point stands. Backing the right person with the right support, rather than replacing them and starting again, is usually the smaller investment and the bigger return.
Margaret Jaouadi: Once an organisation is committed, where should it begin, and what should it resist doing too soon?
Cezary Mączka: Keep the chief executive safe, so do not start at the top. Start where it matters most operationally. Senior leaders, you can usually find on the market. The people who run the day-to-day are much harder to attract and replace. So begin with a pilot one layer below the very top, division or regional directors, where a mistake in method costs little and the system can mature before the highest stakes are placed on it.
Then build a simple map of the competencies critical to a handful of key roles, not the whole organisation at once. At EDF, we started with a clear question: what capabilities do we need, not which positions we need to fill, and only then built development paths. We did not begin with the board or even the directors. We began with the shift leaders and area leaders. You can run a power plant without the board president. You cannot run it without the engineer on duty. Reverse the order, buy the tool before you have defined what it should measure, and you end up with an elaborate system that measures the wrong things very precisely.
The third move, the most important for credibility, is one visible appointment that comes out of the process within the first few months: a promotion or a new role the organisation knows was earned through the system, not through personal sympathy. Without that, the whole thing stays at the level of a slide deck rather than real change.
Two things to avoid at the start. First, an elaborate talent-management IT system before the criteria it is meant to measure exist. I have seen it repeatedly: an organisation buys a system to look systematic before it knows what it is looking for, and ends up with a database of ratings that tell nobody anything. Second, publicly announcing a “successor list” too early. That destroys trust faster than having no plan at all. People not on it find out the worst possible way, and a system meant to build trust becomes a source of demotivation before it has a chance to prove itself.
Margaret Jaouadi: And the resistance you will inevitably meet?
Cezary Mączka: Resistance is part of our nature; we do not like change. So start with the honest question, what is in it for me, and be ready to answer it for the person in front of you. Done properly, it works for both sides. The organisation prepares candidates, invests in their development and widens their scope, and knows it has a successor if something happens. The individual gains skills and qualifications, and their value on the labour market rises too. It is close to what Richard Branson said: invest in your people so they do not want to leave. That is simply the right attitude.
Margaret Jaouadi: Cezary, thank you for a genuinely valuable conversation.
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