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Lee E. Meadows, PhD.
Professor of Management –
Authored: Silent Conspiracy
& Silent Suspicion
Don’t make the company find your replacement
Successful organizations embrace succession leadership as a
crucial function in its ongoing existence. At a gathering of small and mid-size
non-profit organization leaders, I was impressed by their genuine passion for
trying to resolve issues that plague the human condition. I was also surprised
by the amount of service many of these individuals had given to both their
leadership position and the organization itself. Twenty-plus years as the
organizations’ CEO was not an uncommon number and many looked to serve the
organization for years to follow. As a way of appeasing my own curiosity, I
asked several of them if they would be actively involved in selecting their
replacement. I received a few perfunctory smiles, an occasional head nod, and
an unintelligible grunt which I interpreted as a non-committal response. The
most consistent answer and the most surprising were “I’ll let the board worry
about that.” Naturally, I thought, to myself, “What if the board isn’t worrying
about it?”
Now, it’s a pretty safe bet that after spending a number of
years in a CEO position, the person in that role would lay unconscious claim to
that position and the organization as natural extensions of their own
personality. The idea of someone else actually occupying that role sits so far
out of their periphery, that it blinds them to the vision of the organization’s
growth and deafens them to the constant beat of time marching on. It’s no
secret that all of us are impressed with our own professional mortality, but
that ego-centered assessment has some insecure underpinnings and poses a
serious long-term health issue for any organization.
Selecting and developing our own replacement can be quite a
blow to the ego, especially when the organizations’ success is directly linked
to the amount of longevity, service and personal sacrifice by the reining CEO.
It’s no wonder that one of the most consistently under performed activities in
many companies is that of ‘Succession Planning’. There appears an over reliance
on haphazard selection procedures, Executive recruiters or ‘feel good’
interviews that don’t address the core values that guide that organization’s
future. I did some consulting work with a service firm some months back and one
of my responsibilities were to help assess the relevance of many of their
written policies. Well it became evident that many of the policies were in
place for reasons known only to the CEO. Whenever I asked, “What is the basis
for this policy?” The usual response was “I don’t know, it’s in Joe’s head.”
After hearing this response far too often, I said, “If Joe left tomorrow, what
would you do?” One board member responded, “I guess we’d have to keep Joe’s
head.”
Though we have laws that protect Joe from such an outrage,
we don’t have a lot of procedures that protect organizations from Joe’s
imminent departure. Meanwhile, it is in the best interest of the individual CEO
and the organization to consider an internal succession plan that:
- Anticipates the inevitable
gaps: Organizations thrive on the insurgence of new ideas and
energy, while at the same time holding onto its stability through the
efforts of those who have served in some kind of capacity.
- Builds the bench strength: Those
organizations that take an active role in planning, developing and
facilitating the careers of their employees are, essentially, protecting
themselves from a disruptive future.
- Coach out of habit:
Providing feedback, mentoring and challenging assignments should not be
limited to once-a-year, backfill activities, but ingrained into the core
fiber of the organization. More often than not, the next future leader of
the organization is not somewhere over the next horizon, but just may be
over the next cube.