Succession Planning: Best practices for identifying and developing your next leaders

Duration: 60 minutes

In a study of more than 400 senior-level corporate executives, 55 percent said their company’s performance is likely to suffer in the near future due to insufficient leadership talent.

Is there a leadership crisis? Or are companies are failing to identify the right people and prepare them the right way to move into leadership roles at the right time?

That’s a lot of “rights” to keep track of. So whose job is it at your organization? If the answer is “everyone’s” or “no one’s,” succession planning is being done haphazardly or not at all.

Most organizations have well-oiled procedures for finding “replacements.” But there’s a big difference between a replacement and a successor. When an important leader leaves, a “replacement” from outside lacks the intimate knowledge of your organization necessary to hit the ground running. Likewise a “replacement” from inside the organization has the knowledge, but lacks the unique leadership skills necessary to quickly perform at the outgoing leader’s level.

Both scenarios cost the company time and money. What you need is a successor: an employee who has been carefully groomed to take over a highly-impactful leadership role.