SUCCESSION PLANNING

Succession planning is a way to manage. It's not just preparing for the future because it means more involvement, hence more shared ownership and motivation.

The purpose of succession planning is to prepare lower level executives to replace those above them. It ensures that the organization does not have a vacuum in senior positions when someone departs unexpectedly, voluntarily or otherwise.

If no one is prepared to fill the vacant spot, it can take too long and be too costly to groom someone, thereby leaving a critical gap for an intolerable period. Or, a lower level manager could be promoted prematurely thus making expensive mistakes. Hiring from outside is a quick fix but there is always the risk that outsiders will take too long to adjust to the new culture and new colleagues. Feeling anxious to prove themselves, they can make hasty, poor decisions with disastrous results for the business.

Benefits of Succession Planning

Other than ensuring continuity in key roles, succession planning motivates and develops aspiring senior executives. They are developed by being given aspects of their boss's job to learn how to do it before being promoted. It is also motivational to know that they are considered to have senior executive potential and to be given more interesting, challenging work. The boss gains by fostering greater shared ownership because the most talented leaders of the future are more fully involved in critical aspects of their boss's work. Normally, executives reserve the most interesting aspects of their work for themselves and delegate mundane tasks. Ironically, fostering more shared ownership can make executives even more successful than when they do too much themselves.

Resistance to Succession Planning

Many executives avoid preparing successors because they are afraid of becoming dispensable. They feel secure if no one can replace them. There are also primitive territorial instincts involved. Senior directors have worked hard to achieve their status and they feel a lot of ownership for their territory. Preparing someone to take over means facing the fact that, someday, they will have to lose one of their most beloved possessions, the job they have driven themselves so hard to win for so many years.

When people achieve high office they can feel invincible, that no one could do the job better than they can do it, so making it unthinkable that anyone could replace them. Many senior executives also feel that they have reached the summit of their capability and aspirations. If there is nowhere else in the organization for them to go, why prepare someone to take their place? Finally, developing a successor means letting someone else learn those parts of the job that provide the most job satisfaction. Many executives identify so closely with their jobs that letting someone else do parts of it feels like being put out to pasture before they are ready. People gain job satisfaction from making a valued contribution and that means doing the most important parts of their role.

It is very common for executives to feel that they are working through people because they delegate fairly well, but they are really glorified "doers" because they reserve too much of the content of their work for themselves. Working through others more fully entails working oneself out of a job. It means being a catalyst, facilitator, coach and developer of others. Executives who fail to fully involve people in their work are actually not adding as much value to the organization as they could do. Every executive should have dual responsibilities: to make sure today's work gets done but also to contribute to building the organization of the future. Unfortunately, most organizations are caught up in short-tem thinking so that it is only today's results that matter. Some of the reasons why succession planning does not get done are similar to why the environment gets damaged: everyone is racing to meet short-term objectives regardless of how much the future is sacrificed.

Practical Steps in Succession Planning

The first step is to think strategically about what skills the organization might need in the future. They could be quite different from what the incumbent executives are good at today. Then it is a matter of identifying successors. Everyone on a given manager's team should be seen as having some potential to assume more responsibility, if only because assuming otherwise is the surest way to create the self-fulfilling prophesy that they never will amount to anything more. Developing successors must include much more than courses and coaching. The most vital development tool consists in giving potential successors opportunities to do the most central parts of their boss's job. This does not mean permanently assigning them a higher level responsibility. It can mean simply letting them attend some of the boss's meetings, running special projects and standing in for the boss when he or she is absent.


Finally, executives should involve their teams in solving high level problems. Operating as a catalyst or facilitator, they should ask a lot of "What do you think?" questions to draw solutions out of them, thereby developing them and sharing ownership.