Succession Planning

Well, once you get about 100 managers that could become 100 gaping holes in your business, you start to get anxious about who can do what. Then you decide to gauge your team by asking your middle management peers what they think. If you are lucky, you get results that are generally the same and everyone decides on a ranking that you can use. Other times, you have to scratch out an answer that everyone will respect and move on to the next rating. In the end, you discover that you have a very thin line of talent between you and operational disaster. Now what? The work really begins. You need to get managers that are already too busy to notice that their managers aren't good enough to meet the future needs of the business, to create a training plan to elevate their managers' to meet the future needs of the business. You have to keep a pool of talented external managers on a string, hopefully without pissing them off and killing the company's reputation, to plop into openings. Every time you do that you get to convince internal management that the external candidate is just as good and worth training, because they don't realize it is their fault no internal candidates are ready. Now that you have started the cycle, be prepared to dedicate 2 to 3 years to hiring the best external candidates you can identify and afford to pay, while placing your C or better players in elevated positions as often as a manager will offer to nurture them at the next level. If you are lucky, you don't spend those three years begging for a reprieve on the time to fill measures and internal vs. external recruiting ratios. Let me know, if you need any quick and basic succession planning processes you can manage with a spreadsheet, a meeting, and a little patience or a little zanax.