John Maxwell's Rule of 5
John Maxwell's Rule of 5 is a leadership principle: choose the few daily activities that matter most to a goal and do them consistently, the way five swings at a tree every day eventually fells it.
The Rule of 5 comes from leadership author John Maxwell, who tells it as a parable. If you had to chop down a tree, five swings of the axe every single day would eventually bring it down. The point is that consistent, repeated action on a few high-value activities beats sporadic bursts of effort. It is a principle about compounding habits, not a succession framework.
It earns a place in a succession glossary for one reason: succession planning fails far more often from neglect than from bad strategy. The plans that survive are the ones maintained by a small set of repeated actions on a cadence, which is the Rule of 5 applied to a bench.
Translated into succession terms, the five swings are unglamorous and recurring: keep the critical-role list current, refresh readiness calls when people move, attach a dated development action to every gap, review the thinnest roles each quarter, and record who changed what. None of those is difficult in isolation. Doing them consistently, quarter after quarter, is the whole difference between a plan that holds and a document that becomes archaeology.
See where your bench breaks before it matters.
Bring your real org chart. We show you the succession gaps, cascade risks, and bench depth in a 30-minute walkthrough. IT security questions answered on the same call.
IT review first? The FAQs answer the security questions honestly →