Three Stumbling Points (Almost) Every Organization Faces When It Comes to Succession Planning

I spent years helping companies develop their future leader until I realized that I had put the cart before the horse. Knowing how to develop your future leaders and having a purposeful reason for developing them are worlds apart.

The purposeful reason is that you are strategically developing a leadership pipeline that will help carry your organization decades into the future.

Unfortunately, most companies think about leadership development after they've already promoted someone to a leadership roll, which is too little, too late. Simply developing people’s leadership “skills” doesn’t overcome these three stumbling points I’ve witnessed over and over.

1.     Who to pick as future leaders.

Overall, nobody really knows who (or how) to pick as a future leader.

Some organizations like to pick high po’s - high-potential people. Sometimes they choose them right out of college and put all their time, effort, and money into developing those people to be future leaders of the organization. Some organizations wait until people have technically proven themselves and then think, “Since they’re so good at doing the work, they’ll be great as a leader of others as well.” At this point - “later” in someone’s career - the company starts to offer professional development opportunities and asks people to change their behavior to be more “leader-like.”  

My preference is that we develop everybody the minute they walk in the door. That is why our company tagline is Leadership from Day One. Let’s give everybody those skills that we label “leadership skills,” and in the future, if they aspire to leadership… if they like it… if they want to do it… fabulous. They have already got all those “leadership skills” down; and if they choose not to be a leader of others, you have at certainly raised the capabilities of your organization by offering skills development to all. It’s a win-win!

2.     Who’s in charge of succession planning?

The answer to that question is: it’s part the C-suite and part human resources/training/L+D.

The C-suite must be the champions of it, the supporters of it, the promoters of it. They must constantly keep it in front-of-mind for all individuals. This is why we are developing your skills. We see a career for you here over the next X number of years or decades.

But HR or the training department, if you have one, is the one who must execute it; they know what learning people already have, what development they still need, they have access to, and knowledge of professional development opportunities like college programs, LinkedIn learning, and professional association offerings. These departments have their finger on the pulse of where the professional development happens and how to acquire it.

If the idea of succession planning and preparing future leaders does not come down from on high, HR cannot make it happen on their own. So, it is a tandem effort. 

3.     What's the timeframe or the lead time needed for developing future leaders?

If you have not started developing your future leaders already, you are behind the eight ball. Leadership is a behavior and behaviors are hard to teach and change.

You cannot send somebody out to a two-hour mitigating conflict class or giving constructive feedback training program and expect that they are going to understand it, implement it, be good at it, and be able to put it into practice the next time the needs come up.  Behavior change and adoption requires a consistent, slow-drop approach. And, given the myriad of behaviors required (expected!) of a leader... 10 or 15 years of development is reasonable.

Stop the madness of promoting them first and then say, “Oh, hey, let's teach you all those things we didn't teach you before. Now we want you to be functionally good at what you do and manage yourself differently and interact with other people differently.” 

To build a pipeline of effective future leaders, organizations must strategically plan for leadership development much earlier in people’s careers and embrace a long-term horizon that prioritizes developing leadership behaviors, not just skills. Developing leadership capabilities in everyone means that the whole organization will perform better, while some will rise to leadership roles.

PS – In the long run, this is a much less arduous and expensive process that impacts recruitment and retention as well as developing a pipeline of capable future leaders.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn