Business Succession Planning For Dummies

Arnold Dahlke

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781118095140
• eBook ISBN: 9781118230213
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

The fast and easy way to get a handle on business succession planning

While the demand for effective managers continues to grow, the retirement of baby boomers is producing a sharp decline in the ranks of available management personnel. In addition, the executives of the future are expected to be more sophisticated in order to develop and lead new global and technological initiatives. For these reasons, strategic and often long-sighted succession planning for the eventual replacement of managers at all levels has reached a critical level.

Business Succession Planning For Dummies aids managers, human resource professionals, and upper management in cultivating and retaining their existing employees to ensure the availability and capability of persons to assume leadership roles in the future. In plain English, it prepares business owners to ask the difficult questions when it comes to developing a working succession plan for their businesses key positions. This book also offers information on how to retain and train personnel within an organization so that a more seamless transition can be made when a senior leader or other important personnel retires or leaves the organization.

• How to retain and train personnel for a more seamless transition
• Easy-to-follow guidance on developing a working succession plan
• Tips to create a plan to save time, money, knowledge, and clients by hiring from within

If you're a manager or human resources professional looking to develop a working succession plan, this hands-on, friendly guide has you covered.

Part I

What Is a Succession Plan, and Why Do You Need One?

In this part . . .

Succession planning will help you clarify the short-term and long-term staffing needs of your organization, and then set up a tailor-made plan to identify, attract, and deploy the right people for the right jobs. It’s as much a road map to the future as the future itself!

In this part, you see the many ways in which a succession plan strengthens your organization, ensures the continuity of strong leadership, and establishes a long-range strategy for success. You also discover the basic types of succession plans and how they benefit the needs of your organization, today and in the future.

Chapter 1

Sowing the Seeds for Long-Term Success

In This Chapter

Clarifying the need for succession planning

Knowing what successful succession plans have in common

Developing and implementing a succession plan

A succession plan protects your organization’s viability as it moves into the future by making sure that qualified talent is available to replace people in key positions who leave the organization.

Ideally, succession planning is an ongoing, continually readjusting process, a process that is woven into your overall strategic plan as a guarantee that your organization won’t miss a step when a critical position becomes vacant. Succession planning includes developing replacement talent within the organization, as well as identifying externally available talent sources.

Unfortunately, too many organizations put succession planning on the back burner. A key person leaves, and everyone scrambles to find a replacement. That’s short-term thinking. You need to think long-term. In order for your organization to continue to survive and grow in the future, you need to make sure that you’re covered if you lose people in critical positions.

You need succession planning.

A few global trends in organizations

The changes taking place in today’s world are occurring so rapidly and are so widespread that they’re almost impossible to keep up with. Here’s a rundown of several key trends that will impact your organization, if they haven’t already:

The globalization of organizations, both for-profit and nonprofit: Today, more organizations are global than ever before. This means increased interaction among people in different parts of the world with different cultural values and different ways of managing and relating to one another. To thrive in this new world, key people — whether CEOs, upper managers, or other important talent — must have the competencies to deal with such differences. Succession planning is needed to make sure that these competencies aren’t lost if and when people leave. For example, if a global corporation with headquarters in the United States is planning a replacement for a corporate leader, potential new hires must be aware of and sensitive to those cultural differences.

The rapid growth of innovative technologies: In the past, people shared information and learned through mentoring, face-to-face training, and books and other print media. The explosive sharing of information worldwide has changed much of that. An employee who used to go to her manager to find out how to do something can now get the same information online. Organizations used to recruit talent through newsprint ads, job fairs, networking contacts, and professional associations. Today, increased emphasis is given to recruiting people online. Succession planning is needed to make sure that organizations keep up with these technological advances. Not only do organizations need to train and develop people to be more tech-savvy, but they need a systematic plan to make sure that when people leave, new candidates will be equally tech-savvy.

The expansion of the multigenerational workplace: Surveys show that we now have more generations working together in the workplace than ever before. Each generation brings its own set of values, attitudes, behaviors, ways of relating to one another, and ways of working. Effectively managing these different generations is a challenge. Succession planning is needed to make sure that organizations are able to deal with that challenge. For example, when hiring replacements for managers who leave, you need to select people who are capable of dealing with such generational differences.

Why You Need Succession Planning

Today’s world of work is changing in ways that are affecting organizations more than ever before in history. More and more employees are changing career...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Introduction
• Part I: What Is a Succession Plan, and Why Do You Need One?
• Part II: Creating a Plan and Putting It into Action
• Part III: Diving Deeper into Succession Planning
• Part IV: Keeping the Succession Ball Rolling
• Part V: The Part of Tens
• Cheat Sheet