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Every leadermanager™ is responsible for succession planning

Guest post by: Ian Berry

Article Overview: Succession planning concerns every role. As I share with my audiences “succession planning is not just about executives, it is about every role in your organization.” As a financial services branch manager in the 70’s two files in the bottom right hand side of my desk played a vital role in my success, one was my employee bank and the other contained the minutes of my weekly meetings with my staff. Do you have an employee bank? Do you have weekly meetings with your staff?

Every leadermanager™ is responsible for succession planning

© Ian Berry. All rights reserved. As succession planning is an important part of my work with leadermanagers™ I read every article and book I come across on the subject. Sadly one fundamental for success barely rates a mention, that is, succession planning concerns every role. As I share with my audiences “succession planning is not just about executives, it is about every role in your organization.”

As a financial services branch manager in the 70’s two files in the bottom right hand side of my desk played a vital role in my success, one was my employee bank and the other contained the minutes of my weekly meetings with my staff.

Do you have an employee bank? An employee bank is a file that contains the resumes and other details of prospective employees and summaries of conversations and meetings with them. My mentors advised me that having such a bank would mean I would never be without the full compliment of employees I required for too long. They were right. In the 5 cities and 3 states I managed branches in I always maintained such a file. I also viewed recruitment companies as a part of my bank and built relationships with them so that in my file I always had someone in mind to replace all of my employees.

I mentioned this idea to a client this week who has a skills shortage problem. He was embarrassed because he too had been taught about the employee bank, he had just forgotten to have one!

Do you have weekly meetings with your team? One of my mentors gave me an agenda for team meetings I stuck with my entire corporate career because it worked. My agenda was

• What’s worth celebrating?
• What can we do better?
• Personal development (this was a discussion with everyone about the status of their personal development and often included dialogue about future roles)
• Business development (this was a discussion about everyone’s role in growing our business)
• Anything else? (this allowed people to raise whatever they wanted to)

My meetings never went any longer than half an hour. Procedure was then for me to write minutes and send them around for everyone’s signature. The minutes became a document that was a record of our congruence around personal and business goals and the strategies and actions to achieve them, and as such was an invaluable performance management tool.

In almost every business magazine of the many I have read lately there has been an article about employee retention. I do not believe employee retention is the issue. The real leadermanager™ knows there are five main challenges to leading and managing successfully

1. Knowing intimately the value all stakeholders demand, desire, and feel they deserve
2. Matching people to roles that deliver such value
3. Engaging our employees who fulfill these roles while they are with us
4. Capturing their knowledge for use by people in their own way in the future
5. Having replacements on tap for every role we are accountable for

Having an employee bank and conducting a weekly team meeting are two essentials for fulfilling these responsibilities. What else will be addressed in future articles.

Be the difference you want to see in the world.

Ian

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Article Tags: change, futureproofing, succession planning



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