22 Sep Is Succession on Your Fall Agenda?
September has become something of a second new year. Summer winds down, familiar routines return, and leaders refocus on priorities, budgets, and longer-term plans.
Yet one important question is often missing from the fall agenda: Who will lead the business into the future?
Succession planning is easy to postpone. When the current leader is still actively engaged and the business is doing well, it can feel like a distant concern. Immediate demands take precedence, difficult conversations wait for another day, and succession remains somewhere on the list of things the organization knows it should address, but doesn’t.
Succession isn’t just an event that occurs when a leader retires. It’s not only about finding the next CEO, either.
It’s about preparing the organization to thrive beyond its dependence on any one person. It means developing future leaders, strengthening the leadership team, building organizational capacity, and aligning those efforts with where the business is headed. It also requires the current leader to prepare for a changing role and, eventually, to step aside.
Several years ago, we brought together some of our thinking about this work in The Five Ws of Succession Planning. The framework begins with five familiar questions:
- Why does succession matter to you?
- What does a complete succession process involve?
- Where should you begin?
- Who will lead the organization forward?
- When is it time for the current leader to step aside?
The order matters. Too often, organizations begin with “Who?” and start searching for a successor before they understand what the business will need, why the transition matters, or whether the organization itself is prepared.
You don’t need to have all the answers. But it’s better to begin asking the questions before circumstances answer them for you.
For families in business, success is not just measured in fiscal years, but over generations. Yet often, leaders are so focused on the day-to-day that they aren’t able to step back and focus on the issues that impact long-term sustainability. We help leadership teams assess where they are now, where they’re trying to go and how they’re going to get there. Our expertise in the areas of organizational strategy, structure, process and performance is a unique feature of our work, and integral to our transition management approach.
Most leaders accept that at some time in the future, their time at the helm will end and the business will be given into the care of the next leader. However, just thinking about the transition can be daunting and overwhelming for the senior leader. If that weren’t enough, most owners experience their own succession just once. Tandem Partners provides the experience and professional guidance needed to move through the strategic, operational and interpersonal issues that are all a part of transition.