Your Succession Plan Starts a Lot Earlier Than You Think
I recently began working with a small engineering firm to help them with their CEO and COO succession plan. In their favor... they are planning 2 – 10 years in advance (two years for one role and ten years for the other) and they have three potential internal candidates whom they hope will rise to the C-Suite.
Unfortunately, they were unaware that they also have a looming leadership crisis.
As I always do before starting work with a new client, I asked for some HR data:
how many employees over the age of 50?
what is the rate of turnover?
what is the average tenure?
The bar-chart they provided me (see image) depicting tenure was alarming - there is a large gap in mid-career professionals! The employees at this company have been there for eight years or less, or 20+ years. There really is no one who has been there for 10 to 20 years.
Do you see the problem that I see? While the firm's leadership is concentrating on their upcoming succession, I am looking down the road to the next one. Right now, it appears they will not successfully have another succession without some major decisions about grooming their younger workers to accelerate their leadership capabilities or potentially hiring from outside the organization so that the new CEO doesn't turn around in 10 years and realize there's no one for him to pass the baton to.
A recent Korn Ferry article tells us that this situation is going to be more and more common in the coming decade because companies are not hiring as many young, unskilled, entry-level workers as they have in the past. In fact, jobs growth for college graduates is expected to be negative for 2024. Kate Shattuck, a global co-leader of Impact Investing and ESG and Sustainability at Korn Ferry sums up the future: Firms risk creating a leadership and management vacuum by not building a bench of young talent. It sets the stage for a crisis ten years from now when you don’t have people to take over.
So – what are some things you can do to mitigate this risk?
Of course, it starts with getting younger workers in the door. And one of the best ways to do that is through the use of career paths. Identify what skills will be learned in each entry-level role and how those skills might be utilized in different roles (aka through lateral moves). Map this out in a colorful way on a piece of paper to be used during recruiting and interviews. Young people today would like to have a long-term career at your firm, but most of them don’t see it as a possibility because they only see career growth as a vertical path. Demonstrate to them that they will have the opportunity to learn many areas of the business in order to find their “happy place.” 😊 Ultimately, this benefits the organization because you have better-skilled employees to choose from for future-leader roles.
If you find your company to be at immediate risk, like the company depicted in the image, then start now to purposefully hire mid-career managers. There are two important parts to the previous sentence:
Start Now – so that you can be choosy about who will join your team. If you know that you need to hire a mid-career professional today to fill a future leadership role ten years from now, you can take your time to find the perfect candidate whose skills, ambitions, and potential will meet your future needs.
Purposeful means ensuring that you have clearly established what a leader looks like and how they behave in your organization.
Every organization has a “definition” of a leader, but it is rarely voiced out loud. A leader in a healthcare setting might be valued more for their ethics, compassion, and ability to manage chaos. While a leader in a tech company may be valued for innovation, collaboration, and risk-taking/risk management. Without a clear definition of the skills and behaviors of a leader in your organization, hiring “any old” mid-career professional will not necessarily ensure that you are also hiring a future leader. If you’d like help identifying the behaviors of a leader in your organization, you can start with this starter list I’ve been developing for the last year by polling all the audiences I’ve spoken to.
This article was originally posted on LinkedIn.
Real World Learning: Teaching vs Learning
I promised I would expound on what I meant by the concept of real world learning. So here we go!
First, let me differentiate between teaching and learning.
Teaching tends to be passive. It is the transfer of knowledge or skills from one person to another.
Whereas learning can be characterized by those AHA moments when someone says, "Oh, I get it!" They think they arrived at the answer themselves, but really you guided them there.
So how do we go about learning people rather than teaching people?
(Yes I know that's poor grammar. I hope it elicited a chuckle because that's what it was supposed to do!) 😜
How Do We Help People Learn?
𝗔𝗦𝗞 𝗤𝗨𝗘𝗦𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡𝗦: Do you think the inspector would approve this? What would be the logical next step? How could you prevent this from happening again in the future?
𝗔𝗦𝗞 𝙁𝙊𝙍 𝗤𝗨𝗘𝗦𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡𝗦: Do you have any questions for me? How can I help? I'll check back in 20 minutes to see if you have any questions.
𝗖𝗛𝗘𝗖𝗞 𝗜𝗡 𝗙𝗥𝗘𝗤𝗨𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗟𝗬: When you’re asking people to learn something that stretches their abilities, don't simply give instructions and walk away, check-in with them frequently. How's it going? Any hiccups? Anything I can help you with? Don't forget, my job is to help you do your job better.
𝗣𝗘𝗢𝗣𝗟𝗘 𝗟𝗘𝗔𝗥𝗡 𝗧𝗛𝗥𝗢𝗨𝗚𝗛 𝗥𝗘𝗣𝗘𝗧𝗜𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡: Remember how long it took you to master the alphabet? Easily a year or more. And the alphabet was just the 𝘧𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 for where you were going... creating words, reading sentences, understanding context... Don't be frustrated when you think to yourself, Why have I said this three time already this week? That's how people learn!
And finally, 𝗣𝗘𝗢𝗣𝗟𝗘 𝗟𝗘𝗔𝗥𝗡 𝗕𝗬 𝗗𝗢𝗜𝗡𝗚. Remember when you learned to drive a car? Did the classroom portion of driver's ed teach you? Or the actual driving portion? It was the latter. It wasn't a trick question.
Things can make sense in theory and be entirely different in practice. People need hands-on interaction with what they are learning - whether that's how to run a cash register, or how to ask open-ended questions...
None of these tactics require going to a training class, they require consistent application of learning principles.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn.
Winning: Succession Planning as an Offensive Business Tactic
I'll admit that I use the gloom and doom approach when marketing our succession planning services. What if your CEO gets hit by a bus?! I use that tactic because it gets attention faster.
But there are plenty of positive reasons to use succession planning in your business. Succession planning isn't just a way to mitigate risk and avoid catastrophic consequences. It can also drive innovation, enhance stability, and foster long-term growth.
Think of business like a sport. Crisis management, compliance, risk mitigation, and maintaining quality are all defensive strategies. Offensive strategies are designed to seize opportunities, drive growth and innovation, and establish a competitive advantage. Aggressive marketing campaigns, innovative product launches, and strategic acquisitions are offensive strategies.
So where do people fit in the offensive strategy?
Having the right people in the right positions at the right time, are all key. Succession planning, when aligned with an offensive strategy, goes beyond mere risk aversion to become a catalyst for success.
THE BENEFITS OF OFFENSIVE SUCCESSION PLANNING
Driving Innovation and Continuity
By identifying and nurturing future leaders from within, organizations can ensure a continuous flow of fresh ideas and perspectives as higher potential employees are exposed to diverse experiences, challenges, and perspectives, they naturally develop innovative mindsets and problem-solving skills. An internal pipeline of talent can drive initiatives that keep the company at the forefront of industry trends and technological advances. Companies like Google and Apple have strong internal succession plans that not only safeguard leadership continuity but also maintain innovation.Eye on the Future
Succession planning is not just about stability in leadership but also stability in the company's vision and strategic direction. Knowing that there is a clear plan for leadership transition encourages bolder decision-making and long-term investments, aligning with an offensive strategy aimed at growth and market leadership.Attracting and Retaining Top Talent
Top-performing companies don't wait for leadership gaps to appear; they continuously cultivate a pipeline of future leaders. Companies that prioritize succession planning signal their commitment to employee development and career progression which makes it easier to attract high-caliber talent. Likewise, existing employees are more likely to stay and invest their efforts at a company that provides a clear pathway to career advancement (not solely leadership roles). Talent retention is critical for maintaining competitive advantage and operational excellence - key elements of an offensive business strategy.Competitive Advantage
We recently worked with an engineering firm that had a headquarters in one state and five branches in three other states. In a private conversation with me, the CEO shared that the company could probably triple revenue if all of the branches offered the same services that headquarters offered…but they simply did not have the right personnel at their branches to offer each line of service. That's a “perfect” example of a lack of preparing for growth and competitive advantage. By preparing future leaders well in advance, companies ensure that they have the right people ready to lead projects, enter new markets, and drive initiatives. In other words - they have a competitive edge.Cultivate a Leadership Culture
Offensive succession planning promotes a culture of leadership throughout the organization. It encourages a focus on developing leadership qualities at all levels, ensuring that core values, vision, decision making, strategic thinking, and accountability are part of the organizational fabric. A leadership culture enhances the company’s agility and resilience – which is a non-negotiable these days. AND this approach is hugely attractive to GenZ who have witnessed or experienced a number of “life events” that have shaped their perspective on the security of a career and continuous learning in order to be agile and in control of their future.
Shhh, it's your secret advantage
Given the fast-changing business environment of the 2020’s, companies are constantly attempting to outmaneuver the competition. Here’s the “secret sauce:” succession planning. It’s not just a defensive measure- it’s a powerful offensive tactic.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn.
How to Determine the Level of Development Your Up-and-Coming Leaders Needs
You might be curious as to what these pictures and labels mean. It’s an easy way for you to determine the level of professional development your employees need. I want to give credit to @Stephanie Allen, a Fractional COO, who shared this with me - I've adapted it a bit. This exercise is a huge hit with my @Vistage audiences. Every time I have a group assess their leadership candidates, the conversations are very lively, and nine times out of 10, there will be more than a few individuals who will say, “Oh, I'm going to take this back and do this with my own group!”
So here's what you do when you're assessing individuals in your organization and determining what level of development they need. You're going to classify them as a line cook, a home chef, or a professional chef.
Let me expound.
✅ A line cook does a job? They flip the hamburgers, they're in charge of the fries, they do all the prep work, etc. They are a very good individual contributor. They know their job well, but that's all that they do. They're going to need to learn a lot of other skills in the kitchen; they will require the most development to get to the level of a professional chef.
✅ If you have a home chef, that’s a person who can do meal planning, follow a recipe, procure ingredients, and coordinate various tasks so that all the elements of the meal that require different prep times and cooking processes will be put on the table at the same time. A home cook may plan four or five days in advance, they can accommodate special requests if necessary, but they have a limited, project-based focus. They are quite a bit more skilled than the line chef but in a very defined “space.” They will need to expand and refine their current skills.
✅ Finally, we have the professional chef. A professional chef is a person who knows the front of the house, the back of the house, they can do procurement on a massive scale, they can give instruction to 14 different people because they know all of the positions, they generally know more than one cuisine, and have studied under multiple other chefs to expand their capabilities. It takes years to become a professional chef because of all the knowledge and skill required. You can put a lot of faith in this level of employee, asking them to venture into areas in which they aren’t skilled, but because of their body of knowledge they’ll confidently figure it out.
So, now that you know the definitions, how do you execute this in your organization and why?
WHY - This is an easier way for managers to conceptualize performance reviews and,
HOW - using these three labels to determine what kind of development their folks need, and to what level.
✅ The individual contributor will benefit from a variety of professional development opportunities.
✅ The home chef has a lot of good skills but will need to bring them up a few levels. They’ll need to improve consistency, quality, variety, and perhaps begin to specialize (although my preference is to “grow” generalist business professionals, not specialists).
✅ And the professional chef should be utilized to coach and mentor the others. Capitalize on their extensive experience and knowledge to uplevel their younger/newer peers.
The Ecosystem of Succession Planning
I harp on succession planning (a business strategy that involves identifying, developing, and replacing leadership roles) a lot - but it's really one part of an ecosystem your company should be implementing.
This topic came to mind because I was recently speaking to a group of executives of small companies, and after my presentation, one of the people in the audience came up to me and said, “Succession planning is a lot like a Rubik's cube, isn't it?” I thought to myself, “That is a really apt description!”
A Rubik’s Cube
Think of each color on the Rubik's Cube as being a part a different part of the succession planning process - they can be aligned or they can be jumbled up (no real order).
It is not a straightforward process which is probably why so many companies put it on the “To Do Later” list.
So, in this article, I'm going to show you what that ecosystem contains and all the internal practices that will make up the totality of your succession planning. Before I share the model, however, I want to share an insight I recently learned from a Society for Human Resource Management publication. The publication is called People and Strategy and the April 2024 edition had a whole section focused on succession planning. One of the articles in that section talked about the fact that HR processes are built into supporting succession planning. And that perspective is built into our model / ecosystem of succession planning.
The Ecosystem of the Succession Planning Process
Starting at the 12 o’clock position and moving clockwise, all of these things are things that the HR department manages. They can create career paths for roles in the company. They can conduct assessments or hire companies to conduct assessments to determine people's aptitude, their leadership qualities, etc. The succession planning process and the performance appraisal process should be aligned so that every year or six months, however often you're holding your performance appraisal conversations, you're also asking people about their future aspirations in the organization and looking to how you can support those. Will they need experiences? Will they need instruction? Should they get a certification, etc.?
Next, HR is very much involved with professional development; especially if you don't have a dedicated training and development department, then HR will be the resource for finding professional development opportunities for your employees. HR can also create and manage coaching and mentoring opportunities within the organization as well.
BUT HR is NOT the owner of the succession planning process. Ownership needs to come from the C-suite because it is a strategic initiative, and in many cases it's a risk management initiative as well. So you want the leaders of the company to own that mission and then HR - through all of their responsibilities just discussed - can help to carry the process out.
So, it occurred to me as I heard this comment about the Rubik's cube… I just read this article from SHRM… and we've just debuted our Primer (see Note, below)… that really all of us are saying the same thing! Succession Planning can be a complex process, but you don't have to tackle it all at the same time. Knowing what elements support the succession planning process is very beneficial.
Note: We have a one-hour video-based self-study course called the HR Succession Planning Primer that might be helpful to HR professionals to learn what their role is and what the order of succession planning is, if you're about to roll it out in your organization. This model is part of one of those lessons.
What's the Definition of Succession Planning?
A few weeks ago I was a guest on a podcast and the host asked me the simplest of questions:
How do you simply define succession planning?
My response:
Having a pipeline of ready and capable future leaders, which sounds simple and succinct, right?
But the more I’ve reflected on it, the more I've realized that it's really a complex answer that needs unpacking.
What is a pipeline?
A pipeline means more than one person capable of advancing to a leadership position. In the case of succession planning a pipeline means having people who will have the skills your company will need in three years, five years, etc. [Check out this short video on the difference between future leaders and replacement leaders.]
A pipeline means you need to have depth (just picture a pipe – they are long!), not only more than one person, but also more than one generation. When you have multiple generations in the pipeline you have the luxury of slowly preparing future leaders as they work their way up the ladder, which saves you from having to hire leaders from outside the organization (an expensive and risky undertaking).
So a pipeline is more than one individual and more than one generation being prepared to be a potential successor.
Defining Capable and Ready
Most companies don’t think far enough ahead to define what will be needed from future leaders? You need to look at more than functional skills when hiring someone. Skills tell us about their functional prowess: What size budget did they manage? How many people did they manage? What kind of projects did they lead? But in the context of succession planning, you also want to consider their leadership qualifications: What is their belief system about developing others? How often do they provide feedback? What’s the biggest project they allowed one of their direct reports to lead, and how did it work out?
If you’d like 10 Questions to Ask When Interviewing for Leadership – click here.
How far in advance should you be preparing people? Best practice dictates looking ahead and preparing people for future roles 3, 5, and even 10 years in advance. If someone is promoted to a first-line supervisor today, how will you grow their skills and where will they be in three years, in five years? Where could they be in 10 years?
Example:
We just finished working with a client that has a headquarters in one state and offices in five other states. The company shared with us that they could be doing three times the revenue they are doing today if they had people to fill critical leadership roles in the “satellite” offices. (For example, the headquarters office provides environmental consulting, but only two of the five satellite offices do so as well because they do not have people to lead those service lines in the other three offices.) Because they didn’t prepare their own people to fill critical roles in those other states, their only option is to hire leaders from outside the company, but the right talent is hard to find – and expensive. Had they started developing future leaders 5 or 10 years ago, they would not find themselves in this money-losing dilemma. None of those 5 offices is living up to their potential.
Conclusion:
So ready and capable future leaders means to think ahead. Where do you want the company to be in five years and what leaders will you need in the pipeline today to achieve that future?
Success Story:
One of my SCORE clients runs a very successful cocktail bar with just two full-time employees. He is ready to hire a third employee - not because today's business demands it, but because his vision is to open an event space next door and he wants his current employees to be the people who will move over to lead the new facility. So we are constantly discussing - what skills will they need to be capable of managing their own team in the new facility? This small business owner is the perfect example of thinking ahead.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn.
Six Ways to Sink Your Succession Planning
I often speak about how to conduct succession planning correctly, but recently I was asked to share the opposite - what might you do wrong to sink your succession planning? I didn't have an answer right away, but I've been mulling it over for a month or so now, and I've identified 6 things that can sink your succession planning.
❶ Your succession plan is not based on the future of the company
In other words, you shouldn’t be replacing like-with-like. Don’t look at today’s leaders and ask: Where else or who else can we find with these skills? Succession planning should be looking 5, 10, 15 years down the road. Be futuristic in your thinking and ask: Where will this company be in five years? Where will we be in 10 years? And don't just think about your company, your leaders, or your product or service…project what could change in consumer sentiment, what new government regulations might exist, what external conditions might be different when your current leaders will have retired. What skills will a future leader need?
❷ Not being transparent with potential leaders
Companies lose a lot of very talented mid-career individuals when they don't tell them they are in the leadership pipeline. I see it with clients all the time. They know where they think a certain person will be in three or five years, but they haven't told the individual.
When a talented individual feels that they’ve hit a plateau in their career, they start to think: I might as well look elsewhere to learn more, to be stimulated, to get that title I aspire to.
So be transparent with folks that you believe are on the leadership trajectory; of course, tell them Conditions might change, but we see you have leadership potential.
❸ Failing to develop breadth in people’s capabilities
We have a nation of people who are specialists. We've done a terrible job in corporate America of giving people well-rounded business knowledge. We've kept people in their professional silos (e.g. Enter in a finance role and all future development will only be in finance) for decades. As you're getting future leaders prepared, give them a wider lens into how the business works beyond what they do in their current role.
❹ Not looking to the second and third generation of future leaders
In other words, not developing depth. Remember, succession planning is future-focused. You want more than one “level” of leader in the pipeline. Who are you preparing now, for a leadership role 10 or 12 years from now?
❺ Not looking for outside leaders early enough
We have found, in the work that we do with our clients, that there often is not someone in the organization who is capable of being promoted in the next three to five years (see example, below) and the "solution" in the client's mind is, That's a problem for three years down the road.
It's not.
It's a problem for today.
If you identify that there is no one who could step in in an emergency - or even a planned exit, three years from now - you want to start looking for an outside person today because it takes them that long to acclimate, to emulate your culture, to really get a grasp on the long term vision and goals of the organization, and to forge all those internal relationships they need to be a productive leader.
Real World Example
We were working with a small senior leadership team of nine individuals. Each individual was tasked with suggesting who might replace them. One individual showed up on the list of three current leaders! Clearly, he would not replace them all. And when pressed, the leadership team was firm in their belief that no one else in the organization was capable of stepping up soon enough.
The company needed to look for outside leaders with the appropriate skills ASAP.
❻ Not revisiting the plan yearly
Too many organizations say, Great, we've got a succession plan. Let's put it on the shelf and when somebody leaves a position, we'll take it out and see who we chose.
Instead, you must revisit the plan yearly. Situations change, people change, people upgrade their capabilities, they become interested in something else... succession planning should be a constant conversation, just like performance reviews are a constant conversation you are having with people every year (hopefully more than that) about their career trajectory. Your senior leadership team should be having constant yearly conversations about who is in the pipeline and what positions might need to be filled.
Summary: Six ways that you can sync your succession plan:
You're looking to replace today's leaders with people who are just like them.
You are not transparent with the people that are in your succession pipeline.
You're not developing people's breadth of knowledge about how your organization runs.
You're not developing a succession plan with depth (looking ahead two or three generations).
You are waiting too late to bring in outside leaders to fill future vacancies.
You are not revisiting the succession plan yearly.
This article was originally posted on LinkedIn.
Announcing! The HR Primer for Succession Planing
We get calls from HR professionals weekly, asking for help with their succession planning.
~ Where to start?
~ Where is the playbook for this?
~ Is this really my job?
We can’t be everywhere… so we’ve developed this resource for HR!
Introducing the HR Primer for Succession Planning.
Here’s What You’ll Learn:
Session 1 – Baseline Data
· What baseline data do you need to collect so that you can intelligently and confidently talk to your senior leadership team about the urgency of your succession planning “situation.”
· Who (in terms of generation) should you be looking at – within your organization – to potentially be a future leader?
· Why you don’t want to hire senior leadership from outside the organization.
· What control and/or influence HR has in the process and how to confidently push back when you are asked to do things you cannot influence.
· What is the timeframe for getting the next generation of leaders prepared?
Session 2 – Build from Within or Hire from Outside the Company?
· Why the company needs an updated vision, mission, and goals before starting succession planning.
· How to help the senior leadership team to identify the current vision, mission, and goals.
· Leadership is NOT a universal concept: Defining what a “future leader” needs to look like in your organization (with resource).
· Assessing the current pipeline of potential leaders against those competencies/behaviors.
· If you DO have to hire leaders from outside the organization – be sure you are interviewing for leadership competencies, not skills or accomplishments (with resource).
Session 3 – Attitude, Commitment and Perseverance
· Succession planning is NOT a one-time endeavor, it is an ongoing process; therefore you need to be sure your senior leaders are committed to the process.
· Questions your senior leadership team needs to consider, make a decision on, and be aligned on, in order for the succession planning process to be successful (with resource).
· Sometimes doing nothing is the only course of action to take.
· How to make the process more manageable.
· When developing future leaders from within – how is success measured (given it is a multi-year process)?
Session 4 – Supporting Succession Planning and Leadership Development
· The purpose of successful planning is sustained leadership development.
· Model: The eco-system for succession planning (the succession plan does not stand alone).
· Model: The leadership development that is required for well-rounded future leaders.
· Who manages the leadership development and succession planning process?
Available for just $89! To purchase: https://www.trainingdr.com/shop/hr-primer-course
Future Leaders or Replacement Leaders?
Future leader or replacement leader? This is an important concept I've come to realize most organizations (aka company owners/leaders) don't get.
Remember: our bottom line is succession planning. We want ready, capable leaders in the pipeline so that when succession occurs naturally (or unnaturally, maybe someone has an accident or an illness,) you will not panic because you know that you have someone in the pipeline (preferably more than one someone) who can step up to the challenge.
When you are preparing future leaders, you need to have an eye towards the future of your business. You don't want replacement leaders; you want future leaders. Think of it like this: Let's say your dishwasher spews water all over your kitchen floor, requiring it to be replaced. You think to yourself, Now is a great time to upgrade my cracked ceramic to luxury vinyl plank, right? Wrong. The insurance company dictates that your home will be fixed to the condition it was in at the time of the leak. In other words - you are stuck in time. Similarly, when you are talking about the future success of your organization, you don't want a replica of what you already have. You want leaders who will ensure your company adapts to the future.
Here are three practices to help you identify the future and the employees that will get you there.
The first is to look to your industry association. They spend millions of dollars a year to have their finger on the pulse of what is happening in your industry, and they should have identified where the industry as a whole is going. For instance, if the construction industry is moving to 3D-printed homes - what skills will be required to seize that future when it arrives? Who should you recruit now so that you have future leaders with the right skills? Given the speed at which business moves these days, you will not have time to catch up.
Secondly, look at the job descriptions of key roles in your organization. Have they been updated recently? Most job descriptions I look at, inside companies that we work with, are not up to date. The first thing I do is give the job description back to the person currently doing the job and ask them to bring it up to date. If someone is in a job long enough, say three years or five years, the job grows, people adapt and take on new skills and new responsibilities, but nobody thinks to go back and look at the job description! While they are updating the job description, also ask the incumbent to identify what future skills will be needed. It's probable that you won't find these skills today, but you will be able to interview for someone who is thinking ahead, will experiment, and who would rather learn something new than do the same job over and over again.
The third tip for securing future leaders is: In interviews, ask potential future leaders, How do you see this role evolving in three years? Ask this question whether you are hiring from outside your organization or you're looking to promote someone who is already in your company. If they have future-leader potential, they have thought it through. They should have their thumb on the pulse of the industry and know what the role should be focusing on. So ask people, what is the future of this role? What should we be looking at as an organization? How would you help us get there? What tools or resources would you need to help us to get there?
Succession planning is a forward-thinking process that ensures you have a pipeline of ready and capable leaders. These three practices can help to ensure you are preparing your company with future leaders, not replacement leaders.
Centralized or Decentralized Succession Planning?
One of the important strategic decisions you'll have to make when determining how to approach your succession planning is whether you want the execution of it to be centralized or decentralized.
Centralized
If you choose the centralized route, HR will be the hub of the succession planning. They will know who is in the pipeline, they will oversee or even prescribe the professional development that those people will need in order to be prepared, they will sign people up for classes, send them to conferences, hire them coaches, and make sure that they are progressing along a career path and/or a learning path.
Decentralized
In the decentralized approach, all of those responsibilities just listed will be taken on by every department head, whatever title you want to give that (manager, director, VP, etc.). In the decentralized approach, each individual department will plan their own succession pipeline and keep HR in the loop. HR will not have individual sightlines into each department’s or each individual’s succession plan. Instead, HR will be kept apprised of the plan and act as a consultant to the department head.
The role of HR is very different in the centralized versus decentralized approach. In the decentralized approach HR is more of an advisor to each individual department, as opposed to owning the process and making sure that the company, as a whole, has succession planning in place.
Example
If a department head says “I want my folks to have more industry knowledge,” HR would say, “OK, give me a week and I'll come back with a couple of options that might fit your goals.” What HR won't do is assess where people stand now, what development they need, or be involved in the development process in any way other than an advisory role.
HR’s Responsibility
The responsibility that HR has when the process is decentralized is that HR has to make sure that all department heads know what they're doing.
· Do they know how to plan a career trajectory?
· Do they know how to delegate?
· Do they know how to identify special projects or stretch assignments?
· Do they know how to coach?
· Do they know how to teach their people how to coach?
· Are they willing to let people go from their department in order to advance their career and make a more well-rounded contributor to the organization?
The centralized versus decentralized decision depends on how your organization prefers to manage the process and how much time and dedication you think your individual department heads will give to the process. Also, consider if a department head leaves, will the next leader be on board with this responsibility?
Warning: There is one glaring problem when succession planning is decentralized, and that is: if a particular department just drops the ball. HR may not be apprised of the fact that there may be a big gap in the succession pipeline of a particular department. In the centralized scenario, HR will make sure that every spoke in your company hub has a succession plan in place, and people are progressing through that plan.
What Defines a Leader?
This article is NOT about our usual – Succession Planning - but rather it’s about one of the things you really have to think about before your company starts succession planning.
And that is: How do you define “leader” in your organization?
When I speak, I always start my presentations with the question: What does a leader look like? I flip-chart the responses, then ask my audience to “step back” and look at the list.
I ask them: Can you give this list a label? Is there a theme?
I see lightbulbs go off over people’s heads: Oh, these are behaviors or characteristics.
I point out that we talk about “leadership skills” and the need to teach people leadership skills… but the lists almost never contain skills!
Let’s look at the leadership “skill” of ethics.
We expect our leaders to behave ethically, don’t we? But when do we ever teach ethical behavior? It’s kind of a hard thing to teach, right? “Ethics” is more like an internal motivation or mindset. As a society, we are shocked when a “leader” behaves unethically, but we never teach ethics as a skill, do we? (Yes, some executive leadership programs include this topic, but rarely does typical schooling or training address it because it’s hard to teach a behavior!)
Another interesting wrinkle is this: the concept of ethics could be different for every company. If you run a manufacturing firm, ethical behavior can be very different from, say, a hospital and what ethics means in that setting. In a manufacturing firm, you don’t have to deal with the concept of ethics too often. But in a healthcare environment, ethical behavior can come down to every individual patient, every day.
When it comes to defining leadership, we can’t say “these are the behaviors we expect of our leaders,” without further defining what those behaviors actually look like in practice.
And every company needs to define that for themselves.
Why?
Because you can’t “raise up” leaders internally or hire them externally if you don’t know what you’re looking for.
So here is a starter list of leadership behaviors.
These have been collected from presentations that I’ve given in just the last year.
It’s amazing how long the list is! It confirms that “leadership” is wide-ranging.
When I ask clients, Tell me what a leader in your organization looks like, tell me how they are defined, so that we can create more of them, or find more of them, they are generally dumbfounded. They just haven’t thought about it before. While the list I’ve offered is a good start, you have to be more definitive about what these words mean for your organization.
Generally, leadership teams are not united on the definitions of “leader” because no one has ever asked them to have this discussion. Here’s a great analogy: Ask three people to describe the same color. One will say “teal,” another “aqua” and the third “blue-green.” They all know what that term means in their own heads… but they aren’t in agreement, are they?
I’m prompting you to have this discussion with your senior leadership team.
Conduct a “brainstorm-like” meeting and ask: What does a leader look like in this organization? How do they behave? How do we know they are behaving in a leader-like manner? What do we see?
Let’s circle back to how this relates to succession planning.
To conduct succession planning without this definition is futile. In order to develop employees into future leaders, you need to know what that means for your organization. In order to hire from outside your organization for a leadership role, you want to be confident they will be a fit with your culture and values.
To conduct succession planning without this definition is futile.
If that means leaders in this organization behave ethically, describe it:
· Don’t lie
· Don’t take bribes
· Don’t operate behind other’s backs
· Act without bias
· Act without malice
· Put the good of the company before one’s own needs or ambitions
So, start with the list I’ve supplied. Have your senior leaders work with it, discuss, and narrow it down to 5 - 6 leader behaviors from the list (or add your own), and then add 6 – 8 descriptions to define what each looks like in action. You don’t want more than 5 or 6 behaviors because it becomes too cumbersome; pick those that are most important for your organization to function repeatedly in the way that you want it to function.
Once you have these defined, you can start identifying and grooming future leaders who will continue to fit the culture of your organization.
This article was originally posted on LinkedIn.
Three “Positioning Questions” to Answer BEFORE Starting Succession Planning
Succession planning is like running a marathon. It takes a long time to prepare, run, and eventually reach the end of the race. To do so successfully requires continuous focus and dedication.
When I work with clients, I want to know what their “position” is on three things before we get started on succession planning. If a company doesn’t have the stamina to make it to the end of the marathon, it’s better if we don’t start at all. So when I ask these three questions, it gives me an idea as to whether or not the company has the commitment and the stamina to go the distance. I need to suss out – does the C-suite, as an entity, recognize that succession planning is a critical initiative and will they commit the time, the resources, and the attention necessary to make sure it is successful?
Here are a few of the questions I ask to determine their commitment and focus.
Question 1
Question number one is “What if you don’t do anything?”
I usually ask this at the end of my vetting process, after we’ve talked through many concerns and people have realized what successful succession planning really entails. This question is their “out.” I ask, if we don’t do anything…
· What would the future look like? What would be the strategy going forward?
· If you don’t prepare and promote from within, are you okay with hiring senior executives from outside the organization?
· Would you be okay with closing the doors and simply saying, “Hey, we had a good run, but the owner would like to retire now.”
Many, many companies end the way of the last bullet, above. There is certainly the option to not do succession planning – so “what if you don’t do anything?” determines if the company wants to control its destiny or address leadership changes as they come.
Question 2
The second position question is: Which departments are most important? This one generally gets people up in arms. The response is often, “What?! We don’t have a department that’s more important than any others… and that’s absolutely NOT true. If you’re in pharma, R+D is your most important department, followed closely by sales, right? You have to have something to sell, and you have to have people who sell it. In pharma, the most important departments are R+D and sales. Every company has a few departments that are critical to organizational survival. If they go down... the whole place goes down.
If a client doesn’t have the focus or the money to plan successors across the board, then I ask which departments are the most important and most crucial, and we concentrate on those. We’re still going to make a huge difference to the success and longevity of the organization because we’re giving our attention to the most critical parts of the organization. So if the C-suite is committed to succession planning and committed to increasing the life-span of the company, but has limited resources, we can choose where to apply our time and attention.
Question 3
The third question is, “What is your position on hi-po’s versus up-leveling the whole organization?” Hi-po stands for “high potential” employees. I’ve worked with many companies that will put all their eggs in a few baskets, as opposed to increasing the capabilities of the whole organization. Personally, I’m not a fan of hi-po’s I believe that you get much more bang for your buck by up-leveling the whole organization. So, rather than giving six or twelve people “leadership skills,” such as how to be a better communicator, better collaborator, or how to think more critically, etc. why not develop those skills in everybody? If a company is committed to succession planning, they are, by default, committed to leadership development; so why not include everyone in up-leveling their capabilities? At The Training Doctor, we have all sorts of ways of doing this efficiently and economically; drop me a line if you’d like to learn more. For now, let’s stay focused on succession planning and whether your company is “in” or “out.”
To reach the “finish line” of succession planning you must be prepared to “go the distance.” These three questions can help you to assess your company’s commitment to, and stamina for, the process.
This article was originally posted on LinkedIn
Why Do Companies Lose Their Best Employees?
Refer to this “S” image. 🡆
If you think of the bottom curve of that S as when someone enters your company and then starts to move up to the center of that curve, that is someone new to the company who's developing skills and technical knowledge and institutional knowledge, making relationships with others and really immersing themselves in the organization.
The center part of the S is the employee who has hit their stride, they can do their work unconsciously: I'm good at what I do. I don't even think about it anymore. It's hard for me to even explain how I know how to do this. It's just part of who I am. Those people are a real asset to your organization because they hum along constantly being productive, while new people are coming in behind them, starting at the bottom of the S.
The middle of the curve is also the spot where you are most likely to lose your best employees.
The top of the curve is somewhere in the future - where they might become a manager, a director or vice president. The reason companies lose their best employees in the middle part of this curve is because the employee doesn't know there is a future. They don't know that you have plans for them three or five years down the road. And so when they've hit their stride and they're doing their work so unconsciously, they actually can get bored: I've learned it all. I've accomplished it all. I've seen it all before. And I don't see that I'm going anywhere else in this organization.
You, as an employer, are saying: “Hallelujah! This person is at peak productivity”, and the employee is saying, “I’m bored. What’s next?” This attitude is also what makes them the best employees. They're the people who want to keep learning and challenging themselves. They are fabulous employees and they are the ones you want to keep. And yet, too often organizations are unconsciously hurting themselves by not paying attention to the middle part of the S; they’re not giving those folks the stimulation and the engagement that they need.
Solution Time!
When employees have hit this middle part of their career and they're not learning anything new, it's time to move them around in the organization.
Institute lateral moves where they can take their knowledge and skills to a different part of the organization and apply them in a different way that will challenge them.
Give them special projects in their own area where they will utilize their advanced skills but in a very different way; such as running a project from start to finish.
You can ask them What else would you like to learn? or What would you like to contribute to the organization? so that they are engaged and stimulated?
Here are some examples:
Years ago, I worked with an engineer who spent one day a week working in the training department conducting new hire orientation. He absolutely loved meeting new, young employees and telling them about the work they were about to embark on. He didn’t necessarily want to do it full-time, but he also would not have stayed in his regular job if he didn't have this ancillary stimulus. One day a week was just the special sauce that he needed to keep him engaged.
A small business owner with nine “consultants” on staff decided to ask them what special projects they were interested in, that would also benefit the company in some way. She did this in place of performance appraisals. Rather than telling them how they could improve their performance, she asked them how they could contribute to the organization. Seven projects were completed and two were adopted as standard operating procedures for all consultants.
So, before you lose your best employees, step back for a minute.
How many of your employees have been with the company for five years, eight years,or ten years? They're stellar. They're humming along. You would suffer a real setback if you were to lose them. What else can you do for them? How can you keep them engaged and stimulated and staying a strong contributor in your organization?
This article was originally posted on LinkedIn
How to Strategically Integrate Succession Planning into the SOP of Your Organization
Succession Planning can seem like a monumental task.
Most companies / owners don’t start because … where do you begin?
But, what if I told you that there are three easy ways to integrate Succession Planning into the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) of your company so that it is accomplished organically?
Awesome, right?
Great! Let’s go!
[I will disclose one caveat: This approach does take a lot of forethought, but once you have the plan in place, it’s SOP!]
Here are the three ways to make Succession Planning Standard Operating Procedure:
Integrate into performance reviews
Marketing
Coaching and Mentoring
Let's start with SOP number one: integrate into performance reviews. I find that most managers do not actually know how to have the performance management conversation. More often than not, when managers are trained to conduct performance reviews, the focus is on the process. They are taught to fill out forms, how to use the software, how to calculate raises, and we hammer them on getting things done on time, but we don't tell them how to actually conduct the conversation or how to make that conversation worthwhile. And we absolutely never instill in them the overarching belief that the purpose of performance reviews is for the long-term sustainability of the organization. People treat performance reviews like report cards: You got a B+ which earned you a 2% raise, and we'll see you next year!
Let’s fix that right now. Here are three questions that you can teach your managers to ask during performance reviews.
The first is, What do you love about your job? This question gets the employee to start thinking positively about the organization and their role. (I recently read something that said that most people do not understand how they contribute to their organization. Can you believe that? No wonder people leave their jobs. They feel no connection to the company.)
The second question would be, What would you like to learn to enhance your skills in your current job or to enhance your knowledge about the business in a broader sense?
And the third question is, What are your career goals for the next year? The next two years, five years from now? You're priming people to think, what do I contribute to this organization? And where could I go with that? What more would I like to learn? How can I expand my career right here where I already am?
This is step one in building your succession pipeline: Priming and enabling people to see a future with your company.
The second standard operating procedure is marketing.
Yes, you read that right. This marketing comes from senior leaders “down” to the rest of the organization.
The folks in your C-suite need to embrace that succession planning is a non-negotiable. Even more important, they need to be champions of succession planning. They must evangelize to everybody, all of the time, that developing their leadership skills, their knowledge about the organization, and their knowledge about the industry and your business environment is standard operating procedure. Developing skilled, knowledgeable, capable future leaders is a long-term process. But, when you “bake it in” to work responsibilities, it’s not that hard.
The third SOP is to require your up-and-coming leaders to both coach and mentor younger leaders. One of the biggest barriers to succession planning is that people keep all their knowledge in their heads. We just do not have a culture of sharing knowledge and bringing others up within our organizations. But if you require it, if it is standard operating procedure, the process of succession planning is much easier because knowledge, best practices, and lessons learned are always being passed down to younger generations.
A design we frequently use is a three or four-year leadership skill development curriculum in which learners in years two, three, and four must coach peers one year “behind” them, and learners in years three and four must additionally mentor small cohorts of learners who are in years two and three.
So, by years three and four, you have up-and-coming leaders who can coach and give feedback to individuals and can also coach and mentor small groups. And that is 80% of leadership my friends! Subtly and painlessly you have made knowledge sharing, learning, and coaching others standard operating procedure, which feeds into having capable and ready future leaders - and that's how to do succession planning effortlessly!
This article was originally published on LinkedIn
Interleaving + Succession Planning
Interleaving is actually a term used in education: It is a process whereby students mix, or interleave, multiple subjects or topics while they study, in order to improve their learning. For example: when learning about Italy, the math segment might teach about how to calculate the angle of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The history segment might teach about Italy’s alliance with Germany during WWII, and the health segment might teach about the people who live in “blues.”
The way that I like to think of interleaving is similar to this piece of fabric where you have multiple colors that are intertwined with one another, and it's hard to tell where one begins and one ends. They all work together simultaneously to make one pattern.
Similarly, succession planning isn't a standalone.
It includes career paths that you create for every role and every department in your organization so that people know where their careers can go and what they can achieve in your organization.
As well as learning paths that are cobbled on top of - or done in conjunction with - career paths. So not only do people know where their career will go, but they also know what learning or accomplishments they have to achieve in order to hit all of those career milestones.
And it includes performance appraisals. What are you rewarding people for?
And regular performance appraisal conversations tie all of these things together.
Do your managers know how to have worthwhile performance conversations? Are they asking, “Where do you see yourself in five years? What would you like to learn more about, in this organization? Is there a job you'd like to move to, laterally?” These are questions that generally aren't heard in performance appraisal conversations because most performance appraisal conversations look backward rather than looking forward.
And again, when it comes to succession planning, all of these things are done simultaneously. They aren’t done consecutively, they don’t build upon one another, they are interwoven. You're doing all of these things simultaneously, which bolsters your pipeline of future employees.
I often say that succession planning isn't hard, but it is time-consuming and quite tedious. You have to maintain extraordinary attention to detail because there are so many moving parts that have to function on their own as well as intertwined with one another. And the organization has to support all of these things simultaneously.
The reason that I use the term interleaving when talking about succession planning (and I’m probably the only person who does!) is because it is a perfect descriptor of the intertwining of the different “threads” that organizations must define and then commit to support in the long term, in order to ensure they have capable and ready future leaders in their pipeline.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn.