What’s Your Role?

Succession Planning: What’s your role?

Are you an executive with thoughts of retiring in the coming years?

Are you an executive who recognizes the importance of (and some argue the duty of) ensuring the long-term success of your organization?

Are you the Chair of a Board?

Are you a senior leader, or emerging leader, hoping to advance within the organization?

Are you the head of Human Resources?

Succession planning, when done well, actively involves each of these roles (and more).

Organizations must be planning for the future, and part of that future includes the transition of the chief executive and other key people within the organization. It is inevitable.

Organizations without a defined succession planning process often find the change in a crucial leadership position disruptive to the organization — resulting in:

delayed progress on goals and objectives
increased stress, as well as decreased morale and productivity among impacted staff
instability of critical external relationships during transitions, and
turmoil within the Board, when under pressure and unprepared for making pivotal decisions about executive leadership selection.

Organizations who fail to find a ‘great fit’ successor pay the price ten-fold through a multitude of implications, up to and including organizational instability.

Organizations are well served by ensuring they have a solid succession planning process in place before there is an urgent situation.

Many people in the organization play key roles in effective succession planning and leadership transition.

The Board

It is a key responsibility of the Board of Directors to exercise their duty of care in ensuring the continuity of executive leadership. First, they must ensure that they are prepared for an unexpected emergency by defining and approving an emergency succession plan. Second, it is vital that they carry out advanced planning to prepare themselves and the organization for a (hopefully) planned executive change (and possibly, a cascading of changes).

As a Board, their ultimate responsibility is with the chief executive role, however, they would be prudent to require that succession plans are in place for other key roles in the organization as well.

The Board, or Board executive committee, should be proactively identifying requirements for the chief executive, examining both internal and external factors, and current and future dynamics. They would be well served to discuss and reach tentative agreement on the criteria they will use to select a successor. This information will also be of value to the chief executive in assessing and preparing potential successors.

The Chief Executive

Whether their personal plans for change are imminent or a distant thought, the chief executive plays a vital role in ensuring a smooth transition of leadership and continuity of the organization’s mission.

It is essential that they document the emergency succession plan for their role, as well as other vital roles in the organization. They should gain approval of this document by the Board, and ensure the HR director is aware of the vital information.

In addition, the chief executive should be identifying and preparing a number of potential successors for the executive role. This includes:

assessing potential successors’ readiness for the chief executive role,
gauging their interest in this potential promotion, and
proactively creating opportunities to develop the potential successors in areas where high potentials need to grow and that the organization will need in the future.

In proactive succession management, the chief executive will also create opportunities for potential successors to gain exposure to key internal and external relationships that are vital for the organization’s ongoing work.

In high-performing organizations, the chief executive also has in place the key performance metrics that are vital for the executive team to manage to, and the Board to oversee, in order to sustain the organization’s short-term and long-term success. These measures can serve an additional purpose in evaluating and monitoring the organization’s performance during and after an executive transition.

Leadership Team

In addition, the chief executive should work with his/her leadership team to ensure that succession planning is taking place for each of the key roles within the organization. Leadership succession can often have a domino effect in the organization if promotions are from within. The organization should prepare itself to manage multiple transitions effectively and smoothly. Like the chief executive, each senior leader should proactively carry out succession planning following many of the same steps as the chief executive.

Proactive organizations include leadership development in a variety of learning formats to prepare multiple leaders, managers, and emerging leaders to grow and develop to fill new and expanded roles. The senior team should actively identify and support the advancement of emerging leaders through these, and other person-specific growth and development opportunities. They should have a development plan in place for those they are grooming for new and expanded roles.

Human Resources Officer

The Human Resources executive plays a key role, in conjunction with the executive team, in defining and putting in place the necessary elements of a succession planning process for the organization. In addition, the HR executive can be an important support to the Board in ensuring that emergency succession plans are in place, as well as validating that succession plans are documented, routinely re-evaluated, and kept current for critical roles in the organization.

In high-performing organizations, HR executives are a sounding board for the executives as they assess the readiness of and prepare potential successors for key roles. HR executives often play a lead role in laying out the development plan approach and arranging key developmental opportunities, programs, and activities for emerging leaders.

An astute HR executive goes further in the succession planning process by ensuring that onboarding plans are documented and in place for key roles to preserve and pass on institutional knowledge and ensure continuity of progress on goals and objectives during transitions.

Aspiring Leaders

Individuals within the organization seeking to grow, develop, and advance, should also take a proactive role — seeking out every opportunity to:

take on new challenges/projects
gain exposure to numerous aspects of the role(s) they are interested in
consistently demonstrate their competence and integrity
communicate their interest in growing and taking on increasing levels of responsibilities, and
build healthy, collaborative relationships with people throughout the organization.

Furthermore, they should also be actively preparing potential successors for their current role so that they are in fact ready to move effectively into a new or expanded role themselves and have confidence that their current responsibilities will be managed seamlessly by individuals they have sufficiently prepared.

If there is a formalized, organizational succession planning and leadership development process in the organization, emerging leaders should seek every opportunity to be involved.

Proactively planning for leadership transitions

A solid succession planning process contemplates and plans for inevitable transitions in executive leadership, and other key roles, ensuring the continuity of leadership to carry out the mission.

There are many aspects of leadership succession and transition that can proactively be planned for. These are a few:

proactive development of potential successors and emerging leaders for key roles
identification of the needs, requirements, and characteristics the organization will require in the future
the process and structure for selection
mechanisms for sourcing and vetting candidates
a communication plan tailored to important audiences and stakeholders regarding leadership changes
onboarding and transition plans for the effective transfer of knowledge to the successors

Change is inevitable, yet, we often put off the important work of succession planning for another day.

Please post your thoughts and reactions in the comments below.

If you’d like to receive these Inspirations in your inbox every other week, you can subscribe to Kathy’s Excellence Advantage Inspirations Newsletter.
Kathy Letendre, President and Founder of Letendre & Associates, advises organizations and leaders to create their excellence advantage.
Contact Kathy by phone or text at 802-779-4315 or via email.