Leadership Succession Planning

                        

CEO turnover has increased sharply in recent years. C-Suite leaders are failing sooner and falling harder, leaving companies in turmoil.  At all levels, companies are short on quantity and quality of potential leaders.

There’s something wrong with leadership development practices.  Organizations are facing unprecedented challenges in finding successors for top jobs — and worse, so many leaders fail shortly after landing their positions.

Leadership matters. It motivates people beyond their limitations, unleashes energy and gives people direction, synchronizing their efforts.  Financial results define where a company has already been.  In contrast, leadership is a key indicator of the company’s prospects. 

The quality of leadership at every level has a huge impact on everyday operations, and it determines every worker’s level of engagement. That’s why companies spend so much money on elaborate leadership development programs. Nonetheless, succession planning and leadership development simply aren’t working.

The consulting firm A.T. Kearney found that fewer than one in four directors believes his or her company’s board is effective at developing leadership and planning for succession. Almost half of companies with revenues above $500 million have no meaningful CEO succession plan.  Only a small minority of HR executives are satisfied with their companies’ top-management succession processes.

When a company fails to produce the leaders it needs, executives are recruited from the outside.  Needless disruption occurs as they struggle to learn the business and adapt to corporate culture.  Seeking a CEO from outside the company is risky, difficult and more costly.

Directors, CEOs, HR executives and other business leaders have fared poorly at selecting and developing organizational leaders. They don’t seem to understand what makes a leader or what the job entails. They focus on the wrong people for the wrong reasons.

Many fail to recognize that developing other executives is a major part of every leader’s job—and they tend to start the process far too late. They underestimate what it will take for a leader to develop the capabilities to take a complex organization into a future fraught with rapid and destabilizing change.

We leadership coaches can help boards of directors and HR executives sort this leadership development challenge out...to allow for the creation of a tailor-made succession plan for developing leaders within the organization.