A: Business leaders, if you are considering implementing a succession plan in your organization, or if you have one and are thinking about overhauling it, consider putting your plans up against the following common-sense test:
- Am I emotionally invested in making this a success?
If your heart is not in it, it won’t work. You cannot delegate this process. If you are not intimately engaged, then every person brought before you will appear be too underqualified or too threatening. Either way you’ll kill his career. If you don’t believe in succession planning, then don’t do it. If you want to do it, start by educating yourself about it first. As Ben Kingsley says in Searching for Bobby Fischer, “Don’t move until you see it.” - Do I have enough time before my retirement to execute a succession plan?
The upside of waiting until the last moment: as you hear retirement’s siren call, your heart will be in it! The downside of waiting until the last moment: you will have limited time to search for viable alternative candidates should the lead horse fail, which means you’ll have lost much (if not most) of your negotiating leverage. In most businesses, five years is not enough time to source a candidate, test him, bring him up to speed on the nuances of the business, have him develop the necessary customer relationships, have him win over internal people, and build the trust you’ll need to know that your retirement package will be honored. Consider a strategic sale or a merger instead. - Are my line managers driving the process?
Line management, not HR, drives successful succession processes. HR has two main functions: the strategic alignment of people and goals, and tactical, administrative support. Most companies’ HR departments handle the latter function quite well. Many fewer have an HR department that can plug into the business on a strategic level. If your HR department is predominantly administrative, then handing succession over to them is tantamount to delegating your capital structure to your staff accountants. If you are forunate enough to have a strategically capable HR organization, then pushing succession to them will inevitably result in the following question: “And you don’t want the business leaders taking direct responsibility for grooming successors because…?” HR is a support organization, providing the tools to identify, develop, and promote high potential future leaders. Still, HR is not the final voice. As with any profession, the expert offers advice, but ultimately cannot assume responsibility for the final decision. - Have I communicated the process across the organization?
It is true that not announcing the succession plan will save you from having some yucky conversations with people who are bitter about not being named to the list. It is further true that announcing the succession plan will likely create some kind of class system within your organization. (Kudos to you if you’ve built a culture where that does not happen!) But at least the process will be transparent and flexible, with potential mobility across classes… the alternative–an unknown, unspoken cabal of future leaders–results in an inflexible and secretive caste system that erodes trust and encourages politics… precisely what most companies use succession plans to get away from! - Does my language create the right image in everyones’ minds?
Semantics matter, and the semantics around “succession” conjur images of dead kings and queens as much if not more than new faces in the Boardroom.”It’s good to be the king,” remarks Mel Brooks in History of the World, Part I, and don’t we all know it. History is littered with ambitious brothers and uncles, devious regents, and the dead crown princes who took for granted the good life they had. Putting your annointed successor(s) on par with royalty can give less capable individuals the wrong kind of career aspirations. Unless steps are taken to alleviate the chasm between the Chosen Ones and everyone else, ambitious passed-over managers can become as dangerous as Hamlet’s uncle: not only have their desired career paths been blocked, but the reason for the blocks have been given names.A secondary consideration about the phrase “succession planning:” introducing tomorrow’s leaders with a reminder of your mortality is not a good idea if you want to stay positive about the process. Many CEOs struggle with encroaching age every day, from the moment they get up and look at an array of vitamin supplements until they go to bed at 2am, after they have finally digested the last of dinner. Why invite such thoughts into work, too? - Am I taking a long-term, strategic perspective?
Think about developing your people the same way you think about educating your kids: it is what you all need to do to create the right future opportunities. Whatever you call it, make sure key individuals expand themselves to the greatest extent possible so that your business keeps running even after you retire or—heaven forbid—after you get hit by the proverbial bus. Coach them. Take your people and find them opportunities to develop business, move them into other areas of the enterprise and/or give them corporate responsibilities. Get them outside help. Let them come to you with ideas on how and when they’d like to move forward, and if you can’t support those ideas and they fly the coop, so be it. If you develop talent, you will have no problem attracting talent. Put another way, if you develop talent, then the day you need it, it will be there for you.
Whether you are a large enterprise or small business, you should be able to answer “Yes” to all of these questions.
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I'm Jason. I make people shine. My mission is to help 1 million people tell their stories better. 