It’s Never Too Early To Start Leadership Succession Planning

Creating Continuity by Developing Leadership Culture

Imagine you are the general manager of a professional baseball team. Would you start someone in center field in Game 7 of the World Series if they’ve never played in the big leagues? Or, let’s say you are the chief of surgery at a prestigious hospital. How likely are you to ask a first-year medical school student with zero experience to perform complex brain surgery?

Have you ever put a great technical person into a leadership role they were neither prepared for nor interested in filling, only to discover a few months later that you’ve lost a great worker and gained a lousy leader?

Leadership succession planning is so much more complex than simply finding a person to fill a critical role. To avoid any of the scenarios listed above, it’s important to ask yourself the following questions. Consider them a starting point for leadership succession planning. How committed are you to:

• The continuity of your leadership team?
• Retaining quality talent?
• Investing in the development of managers?
• Elevating the essential skills of people to meet your future needs?

What Is a Culture of Leadership?

Perhaps you’re not sure where you stand in relation to these ever-important factors. So, let’s start by investigating how a ‘Culture of Leadership’ can help your continuity at the top and with up-and-coming managers.

Imagine being limited to the ‘best available’ person for a critical role. Or imagine developing them for the role using the limited resources in your organization, only to discover afterwards that you’ve made a terrible mistake.

How could this happen? Frankly, it happens all the time when companies don’t have a current, clear, and candid view of what skills they need and how well certain people fit within their culture and reflect their core values.

A ‘culture of leadership’ is not purely focused on developing technical skills. It also has a keen focus on building the essential skills needed to be an effective leader.

Leadership is not a subject that’s typically taught in school, and it includes some of the following qualities:

• Relationship building
• Delegation
• Active listening
• Building a high-performing team
• Emotional intelligence
• Self-awareness

These are the areas that many potential and existing leaders tend to be weak in, leading to problems later on when they’re promoted and lack the necessary leadership or management skills to do the job. Eventually, the person leaves of their own accord or is pushed out.

Sometimes, you might be much better off in the long run, but the transition is often painful and expensive. Fortunately, there are two key components to building a Culture of Leadership that can help you avoid these landmines.

1. Never Compromise On Core Values

If a person in your organization doesn’t align with your company’s core values, take a pass on hiring them or remove them quickly — even if they are a rainmaker.

Yes, you can upgrade their technical skills, but it’s far harder to fix the baked-in values that don’t mesh with yours.

When people do share your core values, it’s easier to develop and broaden their existing skills while making them feel safe outside their comfort zones.

2. What Do You Think? What Could I Do Better?

Lifelong learners always want to improve their skills, and one key skill is minimizing their deficit of self-awareness. It’s this deficit that accounts for many of the challenges facing organizations and their leaders today.

A lack of self-awareness is easy to fix, but doing so requires having the courage to ask questions like the two above. You must be open to new ideas and different ways of doing things. You must be able to admit that you may be wrong — that your way isn’t the only way, even if it has worked so well for you up to this moment. In other words, you need to be vulnerable and not play the victim.

Few, if any, people can truly say they are completely self-aware. If they do, then they’re probably not very humble. After all, how can they be so sure that they know everything about their impact on others?

You can never be totally self-aware. Even when you think you are, as soon as something in the world changes, it creates a new gap of unawareness that can only be filled with new feedback.

Changes happen every day. They always have and always will. Take the COVID-19 pandemic as an example — an extreme case that affected everyone, everywhere, at the same time. A few years on, it’s safe to say that the pandemic permanently changed how we relate to each other, how we work, how we conduct business, how we relax, and sometimes even who we trust.

It’s led to fewer people saying they can’t change one thing or another and more people asking what they can’t change.

Adaptability and resilience are important qualities that can prepare us for new, unforeseen changes in the future.

Invest in Leadership Succession Planning in Both Good Times and Bad

Companies often don’t want to invest in developing leaders and managers when times are good and the company is flush with money.

Yet when times get tough and stronger leadership is needed more than ever, these same leaders tell us they need the change but can’t afford it.

The real question at any time is: How can you not afford to make this investment to develop leadership?

It’s like deciding to buy insurance while the flood waters are lapping at your front door, or when you’ve just been in a car accident. You should have been investing in leadership succession planning when times were good to be better prepared for these crises (or opportunities). If you don’t invest in times when you don’t need it and can afford it, then when are you ever going to invest?

At the same time, we often have blind spots for the talent in our organizations. We may not recognize the people with specific skill sets who are sitting on the other end of the bench. Oftentimes, these people are not automatically the right fit for a leadership role, but they can be cultivated into excellent leaders if given the opportunity and resources to learn. The more you invest in them, the more you may uncover the considerable raw talent in your organization — people who share your core values and can be developed into so much more.

This is the hidden benefit of succession planning — by assessing the strengths and limitations of your team, you can build an even greater, more diverse pool of talent.

Graph It: Two Ways To Identify Your High Potentials and Blockers

Here are two exercises in leadership succession planning that we regularly take our clients through.

Exercise One:

Plot your people based on their productivity (on the X-axis) and how well they use your core values when making decisions (on the Y-axis).

Those in the upper right of the chart are high on both productivity and values, and they are the people you want to keep at all costs.

In contrast, those falling into the lower left area, scoring low on both measures, are the ones who are not right for your organization.

Exercise Two:

Ask yourself these four questions every three to six months about each person on your team:

• On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely am I to award this person with the highest pay increase and bonus possible?
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do I  want this person on my team? Is this person at risk for low performance? Yes or no.
• Is this person ready for a promotion today? Yes or no.

Next, plot your results on a chart where the X-axis is ‘Always On My Team’ and the Y-Axis is ‘Give The Highest Increase.’ For all those who are at risk for low performance, make their dot red. For all those who are ready for a promotion, color their dot green.

Those in the upper right, and in particular those with green dots, should be retained and developed. Those in the lower right, and especially those whose dots are red, should be put on a performance improvement plan immediately.

Look Back, Look Forward

What you needed 3 to 4 months ago is different than what you need today. What you need 3 to 4 months from today could be even more different.

When you look back over the course of the past 6 to 8 months, you may realize there were foreseeable, seismic changes coming into your business. Changes for which you could have developed some preventative actions to address or at least reduce the issues you’re facing. Without a leadership succession plan in place, however, you will be in a very difficult and different situation.

When it comes to building a Culture of Leadership and using it to cement a lasting legacy, there is one final piece of advice that we frequently give organizations: You don’t have to do succession planning for every position. Start by doing it for your most critical roles.

Tackle those critical roles today and you’ll be ahead of the organizations that have no succession plan and find themselves in panic mode when they can least afford to be.

We think you’ll also like:

1. Repairing Bad Company Culture from the Top
2. The Feedback Follow-Through of Courageous Leaders
3. The Benefits of Generalist Leadership and How to Cultivate It

[Editors’ Note: To learn more about this and related topics, you may want to attend the following on-demand webinars (which you can view at your leisure, and each includes a comprehensive customer PowerPoint about the topic):

1. It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye: Minimizing Risk When Terminating Employees
2. Bare Bones Board Basics: Episode 8: Soft Skills Workshop: Leadership, Communication & Trust
3. Bare Bones Board Basics: Episode 6: Recruiting & Remunerating Directors & What Directors Should Do Before Saying “Yes”

This article was originally published on June 8, 2023. This article was most recently updated by the Financial Poise Editors.]

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