Succession Planning: 5 Ways to Tell if Your Leadership is Future-Proof

Are your leaders ready to rumble?

There’s a world of upheaval on the horizon for business leaders. Nearly 43% of executives report that more than half of their leadership team turned over in the past year—a staggering signal of just how fragile today’s leadership pipelines have become. Against a backdrop of economic volatility, disruptive technologies, and shifting workforce demographics, organizations can’t afford to be caught off guard. Effective succession planning is no longer a “future-focused” exercise—it’s a critical strategy for ensuring stability and business continuity today.

At the same time, your top talent—the very pool from which you must draw the next generation of leaders—is under pressure. Many are actively exploring new opportunities or being aggressively recruited by competitors. Without a robust approach to succession, organizations risk not only vacant roles but also the loss of institutional knowledge and the weakening of leadership culture at precisely the moment it is needed most.

These circumstances have highlighted two significant succession challenges.

First, do you have the right leaders in place to step up on an emergency basis if critical roles become vacant through unplanned temporary or permanent departures? When were the plans last reviewed and do they allow for business continuity?

Second, how much long-term succession planning have you done to identify and groom talent for planned departures? In other words, do you have the bench strength to fill those critical roles – possibly a lot sooner than expected? Is your succession planning forward-focused, factoring in whether your identified talent embraces the skills and behaviors that define fit-for-future leadership, or are they just echoes of the leaders who are making way?

That’s a very long shopping list of needs and shortcomings and, as most businesspeople know, there isn’t always enough time to cover all your bases when it comes to talent management. But one step you simply cannot leave out is a careful assessment of your organizational bench strength and succession planning. Do you have the people to fill critical roles, and do they have the skills to lead into the future?

The following mini-quiz won’t give you a roadmap to a comprehensive succession plan, but it should help you expose areas of immediate need.

1. How often are you having succession planning conversations?

Many organizations see succession planning as an event that kicks into gear once a vacancy has materialized. Succession planning is actually an ongoing process to assess, re-assess and modify talent management strategies to ensure that you are not left with a hole that cannot be filled seamlessly. If you’re a senior leader or an HR professional, and you can’t remember the last strategic succession planning meeting they’ve had, then it’s probably been too long. If it is not part of annual talent reviews, you may be falling short. If it hasn’t been considered in light of strategy changes it may be obsolete. If it doesn’t make it onto the Board agenda, your organization may be exposed.

2. How deep do you need to drill in your succession plan?

A good succession plan will tell you who is ready now to step into a critical position, and who might be ready within varying time horizons to plan for different scenarios. The primary focus should be on your critical roles – those you cannot afford to have vacant. - and consider the domino effect. As leaders are targeted to move into new roles, what does their succession plan look like, in turn?

3. Are your leaders of the future really fit for the future?

Organizations need to define the leadership culture and critical competencies key to future success. While your strategy will determine some of what is identified, there are some over-arching changes that have taken hold. Top talent is demanding a new relationship dynamic with their leaders. Communication, truth telling, connection, inclusion, empathy, and self-awareness are critically important now and will only gain in importance in the new world of work. Once you define a leadership culture, you can assess your current leaders and high potential talent against those future skills and behaviors, to see who has what it takes, where to focus development, and who may not be the best fit for your plans.

4. How will you know when to go external?

A dynamic succession plan should start early enough to allow a focus on internal candidates and grooming them for roles, unless there is a significant strategy change that requires new skill sets. The starting point should always be the talent that is needed – the skills, capabilities, competencies- and then using this as the backdrop to assess leaders This demand-driven, objective assessment provides the foundation for determining a development roadmap for internal leaders and/or when an external candidate is the right answer. In some instances, this may mean hiring someone to go directly into a key leadership role; in other situations, it may mean hiring someone externally with the intent to develop them for a critical role. Following this approach sends the right message internally, regarding growth opportunities, while ensuring that the organization has the talent it needs. And recruitment is focused where it needs to be, not as the fallback response to ensure business continuity.

5. Do you also have a crisis management plan?

In addition to long-term planning, the pandemic has certainly amplified the need for all leaders to be thinking about unplanned and emergency needs. While this might include separation because of illness, or unanticipated retirements, there are certain types of sudden departures that require a more nuanced approach, such as a leader who is forced to step down for performance or questionable behavior. Does your organization have a rapid-response emergency protocol and an emergency successor identified?

The pandemic and other societal impacts that have coalesced have taken a huge toll on business leaders. So much so, that it’s very hard to foresee the full impact it’s going to have on individuals who may be in desperate need of respite or a change. Organizations that build broad succession plans that account for both long-term and short-term departures will be well served well into the future.

Planning ahead allows you to achieve full value from existing leadership bench strength, and support them with targeted recruitment of external talent when necessary. It’s the difference between a state or organizational readiness and having to apply knee-jerk solutions to key talent decisions.

Read our paper The Leadership Handoff