Leadership Succession
Growing your future leaders is extremely key for your organisation, when key leadership roles in your organisation become available, how ready are your future leaders to step up to the challenge? Fortune 500 organisations know the importance of having top talent lined up and ready to go.
Preparing your employees for future Leadership roles consists of two activities: Planning and Development. Planning includes the following interventions:
Identifying emerging leaders who show potential for assuming greater responsibility.
Assessing those leaders against the organisations, leadership model to understand their strengths and development needs.
Developing your organisation’s leadership model, that describes the elements of leadership which are critical to your organisation.
Identifying the kinds of roles that need to be filled.
Ensuring a flow of succession opportunities even if it means removing current leaders that are performing inadequately.
Augmenting future leaders go beyond the classroom. In fact, successful leaders cite other factors besides training when asked to describe their best source of preparation: stretch experiences, a formative mentor, dealing with hardship and conflict etc
Thinking through how your organisation’s Leadership needs will evolve in the future, identifying future leaders, and identifying interventions to strengthen Leadership capability are the core of succession planning. While the future may be uncertain, creating a plan enables the organisation to develop leaders more intentionally and effectively through these structured processes which we are good at conceptualising and executing along with you.
It’s essential to have consensus among the CEO and the senior leadership team about the importance of proactive Leadership augmentation and succession planning. This group should set expectations, put processes in place, and hold the organisation accountable for making it happen.
Next, understand the leadership capabilities required to achieve the organisations’ strategy, with this understanding the organisation can assess the potential of the current leadership team to become the future leaders to meet the emerging needs.
Identify potential future leaders, then diagnose their development needs and built-in systematic processes to cultivate their development.
There will be instances where future Leadership capabilities cannot be fulfilled by the current leadership team, so the organisation should have effective hiring an ongoing on boarding practices to integrate new leaders into the organisation.
Among most processes, leadership development is iterative. collect data to understand and improve best practices and smooth out rough spots.