change management process change management plan
Featuring:
June Juliano, founder and owner of the multiple award-winning Acapello Salons and The Men's Room.
David Pease, Senior Vice President and Chief Resource Officer, Androscoggin Bank, voted one of "Maine's Best Places to Work" multiple times.
"Does anyone here think succession planning is not necessary?" I asked a room full of business leaders. No hands. Good, they're believers. "Who here has succession plans in place in their organization?" No hands. In fact, people looked around at the lack of hands, and giggled. Not so good, they're believers in succession planning who don't do anything about it. June Juliano, David Pease and I were presenting a conference seminar on the topic. We clearly had our work cut out in our call to action.
We're all familiar with the long-standing practice of executive succession planning. For example, David's organization, Androscoggin Bank, has just smoothly chosen a new CEO, thanks to a succession plan put in place four years before. But are executives the only people we need to plan to replace?
Why must organizations have such plans throughout its roles, particularly today? You never know when highly experienced people will leave organizations for a variety of reasons. Irreplaceable is bad business strategy. Can any organization afford to have unfilled gaps in its capacity or intellectual capital? Let's look at just two major factors: economic recovery and the aging workforce.
It is common knowledge that during the recession, employees have felt lucky to have jobs at all, so have stayed in place. It is also common knowledge that economic upturns provide more opportunities for employment. What will those people who have been "stuck" do? They'll look for opportunities that their current organization has not given them. Voluntary turnover will rise.
It is also common knowledge that the workforce is baby-boomer-intensive. Those employees may not be looking at retir ement quite as early as normal because of the recession, but they will be retiring soon, and economic recovery may make that decision more imminent. Both of these factors will create far higher than standard departures of expertise, and in the near future.
What are organizations waiting for?
Succession planning is inarguably a good idea. The alternative strategy is "keep your fingers crossed that someone talented pops up."
Let's de-mystify the concept. Succession planning is simply a process to identify and develop qualified, talented and eager candidates in order to prevent competency shortages. It encompasses formal and informal leadership, as well as subject matter expertise. The following three steps provide the basics of a solid succession plan.
Step One: Hire for any position with professional growth potential in mind. Succession planning is useful at all levels of any organization. The goal is to create as large a pool of potential successors, for all roles, as possible. Hire people with the potential to rise at least two levels of challenge. Even if the position is not a leadership position per se, people need to be able to step up beyond their current job descriptions if organizations are to thrive. And stepping up has to be an attractive proposition.
At Acapello Salons, staff members continuously take on roles they have not previously trained for. June Juliano makes the prospect of promotion attractive and accessible to all. She has structured formal leadership to fit with the artistic and service-oriented aspirations prevalent in the personnel. Had she stayed with the more traditional store manager positions, she would have had to hire from outside as she added sites. Instead, she centralized administrative and human resources duties, and promoted someone who has the potential and drive to excel in those. That person mentors a team of people who are attracted to those functions, and who will be candidate s to succeed her should she move on. The retail stores now have coaches. They are the cheerleaders, guides for ensuring world class guest services, and teachers of technical skills. These jobs are desirable for many staff members, so again, there is a large pool of possible candidates.
Androscoggin Bank has a new senior leadership team, comprised of young people with middle management experience. They are brilliant bankers whose challenges are to lead the organization at their new levels, and in new directions. This new team is comprised of six people, versus the traditional three. David Pease says a three-legged stool can fall over if one leg is removed; the six-legged stool remains stable even if one leg is removed. David is mentoring the new senior leaders in developing their high-level leadership skills. These leaders are also expanding their capacities across the diverse businesses of the bank. Each of the new senior leaders is positioning to be a good candidate f or the topmost roles. In its succession plan, the bank was not looking just for the next CEO; it was looking for a group of viable successors. David is also creating more opportunities for current middle-level leaders, to expand the pool of potential senior leaders.
Step Two: Choose candidates for succession based on attributes, not tenure. Choose them fairly and accurately for high potential. "Potential" can seem subjective and intangible compared to "performance," but it is in fact observable. Give people chances to show different sides of themselves. Note how they approach learning situations, how they seek and use feedback. Measure how they perform compared to expectations; people with high potential aim to exceed expectations. Encourage and document their creativity. Observe how they demonstrate leadership in their current roles. People with high potential don't wait for future opportunities, they make them happen.
Giving people feedback is vital to cultivat ing high potential and realistic self-appraisal. They need to see what they are demonstrating, as clearly as you do. June says "If you've worked with people closely, they themselves know if they are candidates or not. It's important to know how they have performed and how they approach new levels of responsibility before you promote them." David adds "I balance positive and improvement feedback in the proportion that I see it. I'm brutally honest. I select people with high potential and from whom I can learn. I look for diverse skill sets. I look for people to be open, honest, coachable, and accept feedback as a gift."
Step Three: Develop people towards leadership, and not just the formal roles. Leadership is taking initiative and responsibility for professional and organizational success in any role. Give them interesting work and the power to do it well. Mentor them. Both Acapello Salons and Androscoggin Bank have cascading mentoring structures. Those in higher level positions mentor aspirants, throughout each organization. Mentoring is a vital part of the culture; it is business as usual. It encompasses the entire succession planning process.
Use the expertise of highly experienced people to grow new capacity for the organization. Structure a mentoring system that defines and selects high potential performers, shapes individualized goals with them, and helps them measure and assess their own performance. Give the mentors support and skill training. Address these six questions to structure a mentoring system that will meet your organization's unique needs for succession planning.
1. What would it take to succeed the incumbent? Establish criteria, taking into account changing needs.
2. Who could succeed the incumbent? Identify high performing/high potential/high aspiration people. Establish criteria for what "high" looks like in order to ensure fairness. Everyone who meets the criteria should have opportunity to be deve loped in this way. There is risk in developing only one person- what if that person leaves?
3. Who could best mentor them to gain what it takes to succeed? It may not be the incumbent. Each potential successor may need more than one mentor. Experts may not already know how to mentor. They may need training to learn how to set individualized goals, give and receive feedback, and evaluate progress.
4. What will the potential successor do to gain what it takes to succeed? The mentor and potential successor partner to set clear incremental goals and how they will be accomplished.
5. How will progress be measured? How will the plan stay flexible to reflect needs for change? The mentor and potential successor exchange feedback continuously. The potential successor learns to self-measure progress.
6. How will the mentor and potential successor remain energized? Celebrate milestones. These may culminate in the big promotion, or maybe something else.
In summary, succession planning minimizes the significant expense of hiring from outside, builds on talent already in-house, engenders loyalty, and stabilizes and increases organizational capacity. A good plan trumps crossed fingers, every time.
Susan deGrandpre is the owner and principal consultant of Collaboration Consulting. Her website is http://www.collaborationconsulting.biz/ She can be reached at Susan@CollaborationConsulting.biz
She is the author of the book "Common-Sense Workplace Mentoring," available on Amazon.com.
The world and the workplace are way too complex for business people to go it alone. For over 25 years, Susan has shown leaders and employees how to boost their organizations and their careers by systematically merging their knowledge and expertise with each other's.
Susan teaches business people to collaborate for success. Her clients learn to:
*Anticipate and exceed customer expectations.
*Spend fewer training dollars by using t he talent already within the organization.
*Solve problems seamlessly.
*Maintain intellectual capital.
*Improve productivity.
*Install great collaboration as a primary strategy to thrive in a challenging economy.
She consults, designs programs, facilitates, trains and coaches in the areas of:
*Structuring Delegation
*Building Workplace Mentoring Systems
*Developing Strong Teams
*Teaching Productive Communication Skills
*Customer Service