Planning for New Year’s Success…and SUCCESSION!
By Joanie White-Wagoner
It’s January 2020. Do you know what that means? It means succession planning. If you do nothing else this month, start your succession planning. Succession planning is one of the most important parts of leadership development. Why? Because you are going to lose people this year. It is inevitable. The baby-boomer generation is retiring at alarming speeds and people are leaving for a variety of reasons, whether voluntarily, involuntarily, or in some dreadful cases, tragically.
Things happen; life happens. And when they leave, all that intellectual capital leaves with them. Are you prepared? Is your first thought to place an internal candidate to “warm the spot” while you recruit, or are you going to go with an internal candidate just because they are there and, “they seem like the next logical choice,” whether they are qualified or not? WRONG ANSWER! That is called replacement planning, and while it may be convenient, it is not necessarily the best solution.
Succession planning, as part of a leadership development program, can mean wonderful things for an organization. If designed right, as a bottom-up strategy, it can help you identify those employees AT ALL LEVELS who have the potential to be developed into amazing leaders for your organization. This promotes self-development, employee engagement and retains the best employees.
Succession planning is NOT an HR function. Sure, HR will assist with the program development, but the nuts and bolts of a succession planning program are integrated into a robust leadership development program tailored to your organization’s needs and strategic plan. A succession plan should be customized for the role. Too often, organizations focus on the person, not the role. Succession planning should focus not only on the CEO or other top leaders leaving either. I keep saying, and will continue to say; the work is done at the middle management level! Plan for those departures.
Let’s look at the big picture here. Say you have a Director of Radiology that has hinted to his colleagues that he will retire sometime this year. He has worked at your hospital for 35 years. He has singlehandedly been responsible for the PACS system, implementing digital radiology capabilities and such. Reporting to him are radiology technicians. Some have worked with him for several years, but none have ever been responsible for any of the functions that the director has been solely responsible for. In other words, the leadership and knowledge in one of your most critical departments is ONE DEEP. “Uh-OH!” is probably what you’re thinking, but it’s not too late. You as CEO or senior leader, NOT HR, should be having key discussions with all managers, at all levels, about who they may be identifying as “high potential employees.” (Remember those high-middle-low conversations that you have been having? Use them for this step.)
This is the first step. From there, working with HR and other key departments, build a leadership development program that matches the skillsets needed for critical roles. And then, don’t just say, “Okay, we trained you. Now let’s wait for an opening to use you.” Use that training to give these high potential employees a project that they can work together on for a challenge the organization may be facing. Or use them as interim/acting when other leaders are out for vacation or for a day, etc. They may not be versed in a department, but they are now versed in other leadership duties and the staff (who do the work) are the experts. See how this has a domino effect?
Setting up a true succession plan is not as easy as it seems. And it takes time. But it is something that your organization cannot afford not to do. Recruitment is expensive. But what if…you had your own pool of high potential leaders at your fingertips ready and waiting for that opportunity? “Oh, the places you could go!”
