Leadership is an essential component of any successful organization. And in today's competitive business landscape, you need to continuously develop and nurture your leadership talent to stay ahead of the curve.
Effective leaders inspire, guide, and motivate their teams to achieve their goals and drive the company forward. However, leadership skills are not innate. But they can be developed and refined over time through training and experience. That's where custom leadership programs come in.
We have a critical question for you: Do you have someone to replace key employees if they suddenly left? Many companies have good intentions of developing people for key roles, but aren’t ready if a key employee left tomorrow. That creates a big problem.When we have discussions with our partners, we’re often asked that magical question: How do we create a succession plan? And how do we do it effectively?
Finding the right person to fill key roles is one of the greatest challenges of leaders. Firstly, it's important to note: a replacement plan is not the same as a succession plan. It takes time to create individual plans, to develop people, and to give them the experience and mentoring they need to be successful.
If you’re a business leader, it’s safe to believe that you understand the need for, and the benefits of, succession planning. So, for the purpose of this article, we won’t spend much time addressing them. What we will highlight, however, are a few ingredients that are necessary in order to develop bench strength for your key employees. In sports, the definition of bench strength is “the quality and number of players available to substitute during the game”. In business, there’s a bit more focus on the quality piece; but really, the concept is the same. The purpose is to have people ready to step into a different role when a leadership or key position becomes available or when a new role is needed.
I was recently asked this question by the owner of a family business with four sons working in the firm: “How do I choose which one will run the business?”Wow! There are so many ways to answer this question. Family business succession can be complicated. My first response was to ask, “Who wants to?” To which the owner did not know the answer. So that is a good place to start; however, there is more running the family business than just who wants to.
