Your list of what a successor needs isn't a forecast. It's a self-portrait of what got you here.

You are somewhere in a conversation about who takes over, and someone asks what you would need to see in that person. You answer fast. You have been answering it in your head for years. The speed of the answer is the thing worth examining.

A paper published October 1, 2026 in the Journal of Family Business Management puts a number on how founders answer that question. It is titled "Choosing the next generation: what Chinese family business founders seek in their successors." The authors are Lixia Wang of Shanghai Dianji University, and Vigdis Boasson and Emil Boasson, both of Central Michigan University. Vigdis Boasson is listed in the Department of Finance and Law there; Emil Boasson is listed with the university only.

How far I got: the full paper is behind a $39 paywall, so everything here comes from the published abstract. I can tell you what the abstract says. I cannot tell you what is or is not in the pages I did not read.

What they did. According to the abstract, the study uses 1,164 valid responses from a large cross-sectional survey of founders and controlling owner-managers of Chinese family firms, conducted across China. Founders gave nine single-item ratings of successor competencies. The authors also cleaned respondent-level rankings, which left 1,117 valid complete rankings. The three focal ratings were then modeled with ordinary least squares regression, with ordered-logit and other robustness checks reported alongside.

This is a survey of what founders say matters. It is not a study of successors, and it does not follow any handover to see how it turned out. Nothing in the abstract connects a founder's stated priorities to how a business later performed.

"Relationship management and resource integration receive the highest mean importance ratings (both approximately 4.47)."

Study abstract, as supplied through Crossref

The ranking data point the same way. Relationship management had 726 valid top-three selections, resource integration 712, and imitation and innovation 694. Learning and communication came third by mean rating, at 4.34. The abstract names those four and does not list the other five competencies, so I will not guess at them.

Where it varies. Greater family ownership was positively associated with relationship-management ratings and negatively associated with imitation-and-innovation ratings. Founder education was negatively associated with imitation-and-innovation ratings in the baseline model. One more detail matters for reading it: listed firms assigned uniformly high ratings to all three modeled competencies, which produced positive OLS associations but what the abstract calls complete separation in the ordered-logit models. The abstract says these associations are robust to several alternative specifications but are interpreted cautiously because of the cross-sectional design and limited variation in listing status and ownership. That caution is the authors', stated in their own abstract. The abstract also calls the study explicitly descriptive and associational.

Why this lands differently for the person at the top than for anyone else in the building. Your employees do not get to define the successor criteria. A hired CEO answers to a board that does. A founder or controlling owner, the people this survey sampled, writes the criteria and then judges candidates against them. No one in the room is positioned to say the criteria are really a description of you. And the more of the company your family owns, the less friction there is between your preferences and the final decision. In this sample, more family ownership went with a higher rating on relationship management and a lower one on imitation and innovation. The study cannot say why. It only shows the pattern.

The part the research doesn't say, but that I'll say plainly: I read this as a reason to distrust your own list. When you name the competencies a successor needs, you are probably naming what built the business you have, and what built it may not be what the next ten years require. The survey measures stated importance, not need. Founders in this sample put relationship management at the top. It may be that the businesses were built on relationships, and so the founders say so. Whether that is wisdom or habit, this paper cannot tell you. That reading is mine, not the authors'. They did not test it, and the abstract does not make it.

It is also worth remembering this is one country's founders, a cross-sectional snapshot, and an abstract I could not check against its tables. Treat it as a prompt for your own thinking, not a benchmark for your own firm.

One thing to do this week. Write down the three things you would need a successor to be good at. Then, separately, write down the three problems you expect the business to face in five years, without reference to your list. Compare them. Where a competency on the first list does not answer anything on the second, you have found something you are asking for out of habit. Then hand the second list, not the first, to one person you trust who does not report to you, and ask what they would add.

How you weigh a successor is a pattern in how you weigh people generally, and it is hard to see from inside. The Leadership Profile maps how you make those calls.