Every year, it seems that some prime ministerial managers will only last a few weeks on the job. There is much criticism surrounding these short terms, with many arguing that managers should be given more time to achieve culture changes, or the personnel changes necessary to achieve success, and others who are less forgiving saying that short term should not be tolerated. performance.
But if a football manager is fired after only a short time in his job, does that mean that no succession plan has been made? The financial cost of failure and the opportunity cost of lost success can be so great that the pressures to find the right or better manager are enormous. So when a manager is sacked after a short tenure, the club’s board and owners suddenly start looking around to see who’s available for their next appointment. That has to be a resounding no. There has to be an ongoing process of evaluating who is available to take over before the existing manager is sacrificed. There would be no point in firing your manager without a replacement ready to go. This must mean, therefore, that a succession plan already exists before the manager is relieved of his duties. So what is the process of a good estate plan? Is it the same for the world of business and commerce as it is for football?
Identify critical positions.
Critical positions in an organization should be the focus of succession planning. Without these roles, the organization would not be able to effectively meet its business goals. To reuse our football scene, new appointments are usually managed by a network of agents, who are associated with free staff. Football clubs are in constant contact with agents whose job it is to inform the club at any time about who is available on the market, or who could become available in short order.
Identify competencies
A clear understanding of capabilities is needed for successful performance and the setting of clear performance expectations, and for performance appraisal.
Identify succession management strategies.
Once the critical positions have been identified, the next step is to choose between developing or seeking externally.
Implement your succession plan
Once strategies have been identified, your succession plan needs clearly defined timelines, roles and responsibilities.
Evaluate effectiveness
Like all good plans, you need to systematically monitor all of your performance data and make adjustments as necessary. Using our football manager example again, you can attribute points per game, as an effective measure of success, and in business you can use measures like value of deals won or share price as your measures.
Now it is true that football coaches work in a ruthless and impatient environment and the business is probably more forgiving and slower to act. However, with mounting pressure from activist investors and pressure from employees and the media, CEOs have their own job security pressures. In the business world, the role of agents in our soccer analogy is taken over by recruiting organizations, whose role is to constantly stay up-to-date with the talent pool and provide the connections boards and organizations need when looking externally for a job. executive replacement.
Having a methodical and secure process coupled with long-standing working relationships with recruiting firms is one way organizations can avoid crisis calls and retain the confidence of shareholders and markets when senior staff changes occur.
Therefore, it is a responsible risk management approach to consider the process required to replace a senior person before they are lost to the organization.
A common consequence of not having a succession plan is that many boards panic and spend vast amounts of money and time on hasty outside replacements with no affinity for running the business. This is why a well-structured and well-planned succession is always preferred, regardless of whether the personnel change comes from internal or external staff.