Succession Management 2.0

Adapting to nimble new competitors, evolving customer expectations, and rapidly changing technology puts new pressures on company leaders. And, the pace of change often demands new skills and capabilities. As leaders tackle today’s business imperatives, they must also look ahead to envision the leadership traits the organization will need to succeed tomorrow.

Often, the adaptive leaders you’re looking for are already in the organization, but a level or two down where business-as-usual succession management and talent development programs may not find them.

Today’s realities require identifying and preparing potential successors who have the characteristics you need, just not the performance track records to fully demonstrate them. To uncover and develop these hidden gems and prepare them to leapfrog traditional succession paths, you need to add empirical measurements of innate behavioral and leadership characteristics to the qualitative tools already in place within your talent development program.

The most important element? Get specific

Too often, leadership development programs take a generic approach, only identifying desired leadership skills at the universal level. While this is an important way to reinforce your company’s core leadership values, don’t stop there.

Dig deeper to identify the unique leadership characteristics required by different roles. Ultimately, you want to create role-specific leadership profiles that give you the base of knowledge you need to effectively – and objectively – evaluate potential internal and external successor candidates.

In my practice, I help clients enhance their succession management strategies by supplementing qualitative elements like job descriptions and 360s with an evidence-based, psycho-metric tool called the CDR 3D Leadership Behavioral Characteristic Assessment. The CDR is based on a deep foundation of more than 500,000 assessments in 100 different job categories, so by leveraging this type of objective measure, combined with input from the client, I’m able to develop bespoke profiles for specific leadership roles.

Applied to succession management, the added layer of empirical evidence helps expand the diversity of candidates identified for consideration while reducing unconscious bias and cloning. The addition of these types of evidence-based insights also identifies potential risks or de-railers that can be addressed through individualized development plans combined with broader leadership training.

Integrating succession management within your overall talent management strategy inspires greater confidence when making succession decisions, puts the successors themselves in a better position to succeed, and results in less disruption to the business.  

Optimizing succession management and helping companies apply strategic, objective insights to increase the predictability of their talent decisions is a central focus of my practice. Contact me to talk about how these tools can help your company strengthen its leadership pipeline.