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Passing the Torch: The Art of Succession Planning

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StrategyDriven Succession and Succession Planning Article | Passing the Torch: The Art of Succession Planning

In‍ the ever-evolving⁣ landscape of business, few things are as crucial as a well-executed succession plan. As ‌seasoned leaders begin to pass the torch to the next generation, the⁣ art of succession planning becomes paramount in ensuring the ⁤continued success and growth of ​an organization. Join us as ⁤we delve into‌ the intricate process of passing ⁢the torch and ‌explore the strategies and ​considerations that go into crafting a seamless transition of power.

Identifying‍ Key Successors within⁣ the Organization

is a crucial aspect of ensuring ‌a smooth transition of leadership. Succession planning is not just about finding someone to ⁤fill a ​role when a leader​ steps down; it is about grooming and developing individuals who have the potential‌ to take ​on ‌greater responsibilities in the ⁢future.

When identifying key ‍successors, it is important to look for individuals who‍ possess the necessary skills, knowledge, and qualities to be successful​ leaders. These are individuals who have shown⁢ potential‌ for growth, have a strong work ethic, and are ⁣able⁤ to adapt to ‍changing ‌environments. ‍By investing‌ in the development⁤ of ⁢these individuals, organizations can ensure continuity and ⁣stability in leadership positions.

Developing ⁢a Comprehensive Succession Plan

Are you prepared to pass ‌the torch ​and ensure the ‍future ⁢success⁣ of your organization? is essential​ for a smooth transition of leadership and sustaining long-term​ growth. By taking the ‌time to strategize and identify key leaders within your organization, you can ⁣pave ⁣the way for a seamless handover of⁤ responsibilities.

Don’t wait ⁤until it’s too ​late to start succession‍ planning.​ Start the process by evaluating the current leadership team and identifying potential candidates for future leadership roles.‍ Invest ⁣in their⁣ development through training ‌and mentorship programs to ensure they are equipped with the skills⁢ and ⁣knowledge needed⁣ to take ‌on higher positions. ​Remember, succession planning is not ‌just about filling a vacancy – it’s about building a strong foundation ‍for the future success of your organization.

Implementing Effective ​Leadership Development Programs

Succession planning ⁢is a critical component ⁢of ‍effective leadership development programs. It involves identifying and nurturing future leaders within an organization ‍to ensure a smooth transition of power when key executives retire or ‍move on.‍ One key aspect of succession planning​ is‍ identifying⁣ high-potential employees who have the skills and qualities needed to step into ​leadership roles.

Another important element of succession planning is providing development opportunities ⁤ for potential leaders to‌ help them grow⁣ and ‍acquire the necessary skills.⁣ This can include mentoring programs, leadership training workshops, and stretch assignments‌ that challenge individuals to⁣ take on new ⁣responsibilities and develop‍ their ​leadership⁤ abilities. By investing in succession​ planning, ​organizations can⁣ ensure continuity of leadership and position themselves‌ for long-term success.

Ensuring Smooth Transition⁣ of Responsibilities

Succession planning is a⁢ crucial aspect of​ ensuring ‍a smooth transition⁢ of responsibilities ​within any organization. It‌ involves identifying‍ and developing ‌potential future leaders, equipping them with ⁣the⁤ necessary skills and knowledge to take on key roles ‌when‌ the time comes. By effectively passing the torch from one generation of leaders to the next, organizations⁣ can ensure continuity, stability, and⁣ continued success.

Key⁣ elements ‌of successful​ succession planning include clear communication, proper training and development programs, and a focus on building ​a ⁣strong ⁢pipeline of talent. It is important ⁤for current ‍leaders to ‍mentor‍ and groom ‌potential successors, providing them ⁣with opportunities ​to learn, grow,⁤ and ​take on increasing levels of responsibility. By investing in⁣ succession planning, organizations can mitigate risks associated with ​leadership turnover and maintain a competitive edge in today’s rapidly ⁣changing business ⁢environment.

Final Thoughts…

As⁢ we’ve explored the delicate art of‍ succession planning, we’ve discovered ​the importance of‌ preparing for the future and ensuring the longevity of ‍our organizations. Embracing this process can lead to a smooth ‌transition of‌ leadership and foster growth and prosperity for ‌years to ⁣come. Remember, passing the​ torch ‍is not just about handing over responsibilities, but about preserving a ⁢legacy⁤ and ⁢setting the ‌stage​ for continued success. So, take the‌ time to plan, communicate effectively,‍ and⁤ nurture the next generation of leaders.‍ The future is bright, and with careful planning, ⁤we ⁢can ensure a⁤ seamless handover of the torch.

StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Keep your best staff members|Top Talent: How To Keep Your Best Members Of Staff

Top Talent: How To Keep Your Best Members Of Staff

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Keep your best staff members|Top Talent: How To Keep Your Best Members Of StaffBusinesses will know the huge expense of recruitment, so when you have a team of skilled team members, it’s in your interest, and theirs, to remain part of the company. The success of your organization depends on having a talented team in place, but it’s all too easy to take people for granted and only realize you should have done more when it’s too late.

Holding on to your key employees is essential in maintaining great results in your business, saving time and money when it comes to recruitment, and retaining employee engagement. Here are some tips for creating an environment that people want to work in long-term.

Stay up to date with the market

Pay is one of the primary reasons people take on jobs and show up for work every day, so it stands to reason that it’s also one of the top reasons employees might be inspired to leave a company. If you’re not continually assessing the compensation you’re providing to your staff in relation to your competitors and industry standards, you could be at risk of losing your top members of staff.

Make sure that you’re offering an attractive salary to retain talented candidates and offer regular raises or bonuses, particularly for highly skilled or hard-to-fill roles, to minimize the risk of compensation-based staff turnover.

Keep progression in mind

If your staff feel as though the role they’re in is as far as they’ll go in the company, they’re not going to be inspired to stay. But if you can offer them career development, mentorship and opportunities on the career ladder that they can climb if they choose to, they’ll be more inclined to stay loyal to your company. Succession planning not only motivates your staff, but it also means you’re building a highly skilled team that will provide value within the business. Take the time to talk to your employees, find out where they ideally see their career going and work together to make it a reality that benefits both your team and your business.

Create a positive work environment

No-one wants to head into work five days a week only to feel lonely or miserable. As a business owner, you have a responsibility to provide a happy, healthy work environment for your employees. Your employees will be motivated to come into the office if there is a positive workplace culture coupled with great amenities, such as chill-out spaces, on-site gyms and pool tables, or free coffee and snacks, as well as communal benefits such as happy hour on Friday after work or team days out.

The physical workplace is just as important when it comes to creating a positive work experience for your employees with benefits, regular socials, meetings and team-building activities. Engaging staff helps them to not only perform their best at work but also want to stay part of the team.

Don’t overwork your team

Your A-players are likely to give their all at work. After all, their dedication and engagement is part of what makes them your top members of staff. But over time, that can take its toll. Employees that don’t have a healthy work-life balance will begin to burnout, and that can result in them leaving for a job that offers more flexibility. With only one third of UK employees happy with their work-life balance, businesses that want to retain their skilled staff need to be conscious of making sure that their employees are getting ample rest, that they’re not working excessively and that the workload they’re being given is realistic.

Prioritize two-way communication

Communication is critical in any relationship, and when it comes to keeping your employees happy and engaged, it needs to be a priority. This means putting sufficient time aside to sit down with your employees to talk about their performance and your expectations, as well as giving them the opportunity to voice their thoughts and concerns. Two-way dialogue is vital if you want to retain your top performers for a long time, as no-one wants to work for a company that doesn’t value their opinion or take their feedback on board. When communication is open and honest, it creates a culture of trust – something that employees value highly.

Recruitment can slow your business’ ability to scale up and achieve goals. A high turnover takes its toll on a company’s productivity, reputation, and workflow. It is both costly and time-consuming, and can have a negative impact on morale if staff turnover rates remain high. So, it’s in your interest to keep your team on side for longer, especially when it comes to retaining your top-performing employees.

StrategyDriven Business Politics Impacts Article | The Consequences of Bad Leadership

The Consequences of Bad Leadership

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StrategyDriven Business Politics Impacts Article | The Consequences of Bad LeadershipAn area of Buenos Aires nicknamed Villa Freud boasts the highest concentration of psychoanalysts per capita in the world. Even the bars and cafe?s have Freudian names, such as the Oedipus Complex and the Unconscious. Many of the residents are therapists, in therapy, or both. In fact, psychoanalysts are only allowed to be therapists if they are in therapy themselves. The requirement creates a self-perpetuating and ever-expanding universe of psychoanalysts and patients. It’s like an inverted – and unhealthy – pyramid scheme. Every new shrink is another shrink’s new patient, and the arrangement keeps both supply and demand perennially high.[wcm_restrict plans=”25541, 25542, 25653″]

I grew up in Villa Freud. Even our dog saw a shrink, though it was always clear to me – perhaps even to our dog – that the dog shrink was really dealing with our problems, rather than our dog’s. When I had to decide on a career, the choice was almost inevitable: I had to become a psychologist.

Growing up in Argentina also nurtured my interest in leadership, especially the problematic type. A century ago, Argentina was the future. It was not just the land of opportunity, but also one of the richest countries in the world, with a GDP per capita higher than that of France and Germany. Yet Argentina has been in constant decline ever since, being one of the few perpetually devolving countries in the world. The main reason? One bad leader after another. So, I asked myself the obvious questions: How can smart and educated people make self-destructive leadership choices, political term after term, without learning the les- sons from previous failures? How can rational people who have their own best interests at heart fall for charismatic con artists who promise them the impossible while pursuing harmful agendas and corrupt selfish interests? Although this depressing state of affairs eventually propelled me to leave Argentina, I promised myself that I would do what it took to understand – and help fix – this toxic side of leadership.

And indeed, today I am a leadership psychologist. Much of my work focuses on helping organizations avoid incompetent leaders and make the already-installed leaders less ineffective. The work has important repercussions. When you get it right, you see enormous benefits to the organization and its people. And when you get it wrong, you get . . . Argentina.

In business, a bad leader significantly affects subordinates by reducing their engagement—their enthusiasm for their jobs and the meaning and purpose people find at work. Global surveys report that a staggering 70 percent of employees are not engaged at work and that only 4 percent of these employees have anything nice to say about their bosses.9 Quite clearly, good leadership is not the norm, but the exception.

The economic cost of disengagement is even more astounding. In the United States alone, lower engagement translates into an annual productivity loss of around $500 billion.10 This estimate is probably conservative, since it is based on large multinational corporations: organizations that actually bother asking employees how they feel about their jobs and that devote considerable time and money to improve how their employees experience work. The average employee in the world is probably even more miserable.

Productivity loss is not the only downside of disengagement. Disengaged employees are also more likely to quit their jobs. Employee turnover incurs a huge burden, including separation costs, damaged morale, and productivity losses associated with the time and resources needed to find and train newcomers. Between 10 and 30 percent of the employees’ annual salary is lost to turnover costs. The figure is even higher for replacing leaders, since top executive-search firms will charge around 30 percent of the leader’s annual salary on top. And turnover is not always the worst-case scenario for businesses. When disengaged employees do decide to stay, they are more likely to misbehave, for example, abusing staff, bending the rules, and committing fraud.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember plans=”25541, 25542, 25653″]

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Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted from Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders: (And How to Fix It) by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic. Copyright 2019 Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic. All rights reserved.

About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor | Tomas Chamorro-PremuzicTomas Chamorro-Premuzic is the Chief Talent Scientist at Manpower Group, co-founder of Deeper Signals and Metaprofiling, and Professor of Business Psychology at University College London and Columbia University

Michael Timms

Recruiting is Broken, Succession Planning is The Future

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Yes, I realize that saying “recruiting is broken” may sound like something Donald Trump would say if he was in the HR business. But as inflammatory as it may sound, it’s true. Think about it. Is your recruiting process delivering, on a regular basis, the top-tier leaders that your company is desperately seeking? Most people that I talk to are telling me “no.” They’re not happy with the results that their recruiters are producing, or at the very least, they’ve come to terms with what their recruiters can realistically produce.[wcm_restrict]

Succession Planning That WorksRecruiting Is Overused and Misapplied

If you’re not happy with what you’re recruiters are producing, it’s probably not their fault. Recruiting is like a hammer. It used to be the only tool a framer had to frame a house with. But with the invention of the nail gun, everything changed. What used to take days to build now only takes hours. Framing went from being a constraint in the building process to becoming a stage that could be easily scaled up. If you’re building a house and the only tool you’ve supplied your framer is a hammer, then then don’t blame the framer if it takes five times longer than you’d like, and costs a bundle more than it should.

When a vacancy occurs, most senior leaders instinctively instruct their HR team to ‘hammer it,’ not realizing that there is a much more sophisticated, highly effective and less costly alternative. In construction, hammers are still used, but the scope of their use is much smaller and the projects they are used on are much more targeted. Likewise, there will always be a need for recruiting, but recruiting’s most important function is to bring in entry-level employees who are trainable, have a strong work ethic, and who bring the right attitudes.

Succession Planning That Works

Succession planning answers arguably the greatest talent management question of the 21st century: how will organizations fill the void left by the baby-boomers? Unfortunately, most succession plans don’t work. About 90% don’t work, in fact, according to a study by Deloitte and validated by my own observations. So last year I decided to find out why, exactly, most succession plans don’t work. I interviewed over 50 executives from nearly 50 different companies to discover what has worked for them, and what hasn’t, in their efforts to grow their bench strength from within. What I discovered is that building a strong pipeline of talent boils down to three general principles.

  1. Executive leadership and buy-in. Succession planning must be led by the top executive, not simply delegated to human resources. This means that leadership development must be on a very short list of an organization’s top strategic priorities.
  2. Keep it simple. Organizations with effective succession plans remove everything extraneous and bureaucratic in favor of simplicity and efficiency.
  3. Follow the Critical Path. For the best chance at success, organizations must complete the right succession planning activities, at the right time, and in the right order.

I write about these principles and other little-known gems of creative and effective tactics that organizations have taken to make succession planning work for them in my new book Succession Planning That Works: The Critical Path of Leadership Development.

Forget Incremental Improvements, You Need A New Tool

Just as hammers have been incrementally improved over the years with new materials and larger sizes, so has recruiting made incremental improvements by incorporating behavioural interviewing techniques and taking advantage of social media platforms. But incremental improvements just won’t cut it any longer with the demographic tsunami at our doorstep. Companies need a new tool to break through the constraint that talent acquisition has become to organizational growth.

Companies that rely primarily on the blunt tool of recruiting to fill their key positions will soon be bypassed by those who embrace succession planning. If organizations want to secure a pipeline of talent for the precarious times ahead, they must act now to implement a succession plan that works.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Author

Michael TimmsMichael Timms is a management consultant, author and speaker specializing in organization and leadership performance and the founder and principal of Avail Leadership. Michael is also the author of the new book, Succession Planning That Works. You can learn more about Timms and his book at www.availleadership.com and connect via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Do you have the next generation of leaders you need?

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Anxiety is high among organizational leaders that as vital as a new generation of leaders is, many do not feel ready to promote talent.

In a recent survey by Korn Ferry, only 39 percent of those surveyed believed their organizations had the right talent to succeed in today’s changing global environment. One third did not feel their organization is ready to promote its talent at all.

With succession management so critical to driving a competitive advantage and securing a company’s future, what is hindering organizations from preparing for and feeling confident in their succession development efforts?

According to the same survey, based on responses from 100+ senior-level executives from 49 countries, the top issue detracting from talent management efforts is buy-in of a global talent management approach. Why global?

[wcm_restrict]As companies are operating globally, their ability to develop executives who can lead across borders is critical. Effective global succession management, or the practice of identifying up to the third generation of successors for a particular role, requires companies to promote and develop people not only based on ‘what they do’ but ‘who they are.’ That means finding and developing leaders who have a blend of the right competencies and experiences, as well as the right personal traits, such as openness to new ideas, risk taking, and cultural agility; plus a paradoxical blend of motivators such as collaboration and autonomy, status and achievement.

This means that companies need to evaluate the full person, and not just what they are good at. When they do, they will achieve greater success.

What can you do to take a global approach?

  • Dig deeper. Many organizations believe they are taking a global approach, yet find that their talent is still not moving across functions or regions, or that talent management remains siloed. Take a close look at how your organization currently functions and compare it to organizations that are running truly global talent management approaches. What needs to change?
  • Break down the siloes. This allows talent to be seen and owned as an enterprise-wide asset. This facilitates more cross-functional or lateral promotions to ensure leaders gain the key experiences necessary to advance to higher levels of leadership. It also provides leaders with cross-cultural and diversity leadership experience which becomes increasingly more important as organizations take a fluid approach to transferring and promoting talent.
  • Re-evaluate succession planning. Succession starts by identifying which roles are mission critical and then accurately identifying high potential leaders who have the leadership characteristics and motivation to advance into those roles. Not all high performing leaders are high potential and not all leaders want to move up.
  • Drive focused development. While high potential leaders need to develop overall leadership skills, knowing exactly what the challenges are at the next levels and developing against those, will help ensure that they target development to prepare to meet those challenges. It also helps make transitions into new roles easier and less susceptible to derailment.
  • Measure readiness. Developing a leader for a role does not guarantee that he or she is ready to step into that role. By measuring readiness, you can know exactly how far or close a leader is to being fully ready – and also close remaining development gaps.

A global approach to succession will ensure that your organization leverages the full force of leadership talent across the enterprise. It will help you gain confidence that you do indeed have the talent you need to succeed.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Author

Andrés Tapia is senior partner, Leadership and Talent Consulting, Korn Ferry.