Succession Planning
Succession planning is leadership insurance. It involves training promising candidates into future leaders and Mac truck planning so that you can move on to new things while leaving behind several people capable of fulfilling your responsibilities in your stead.
Preparing Successors
Many people are afraid of leading and consider leadership to be something that other people are capable of. But many people are capable of learning to lead with some training and experience. Indeed one of the most essential aspects of leadership is making leaders out of people.
1. Training Candidates
Choose people who you see as having leadership potential. Do not tell them you have your eye on them to succeed you! Instead offer them gradually increasing assignments and responsibilities so as not to build their confidence and competence without overwhelming them or scaring them away.
2. Train Multiple Candidates
Train several candidates at once to have a second choice. When the time comes to ask a candidate to actually succeed you, their life may have changed due to things like family and finances and they may be unwilling or unable to take the job. This is why you need a second or more choices picked out.
3. Asking Trained Candidates To Consider Succession
You have to ask some time. There comes a time when you judge a given candidate to have reached a suficient level of reliability and enthusiasm. When they are ready, ask them if they are interested in possibly succeeding you.
Explain that you cannot promise the job as you don't control the future but find out if they would be interested in the opportunity to take over for you if the need arose. Explain the responsibilities and benefits of the job. Discuss the waht-ifs and see how the role's demands fit with their own life plans.
If you can get several suitable candidates interested, then great, succession planning is achieved. If they decline, keep looking and developing talented people until you find your understudies.
Give those candidates who are express interest even more opportunities to tackle all the aspects of doing what you do so that when the time comes they already know what to do and you will be free to hand over your badge and move on.
4. Asking Them To Actually Take The Helm
When the time comes that you do want to leave your position to change gears, you get to pop the question: Will you take the job? If you have done a good job preparing candidates for the eventuality, it may be time to have a going away party! So what if you are just moving into the corner office.
But what if you don't have an orderly and voluntary succession process. What happens if you just disappear?
Mack Truck Planning
What happens if you get hit by a Mack Truck? Your survivors and successors check your Mack Truck Plan.
Your Mack Truck Plan contains all your passwords for mission-critical resources such as web sites, Second Life accounts, etc..
If something happens to you, your Mack Truck Plan goes into effect and your successors can take over.
Keep your Mack Truck plan somewhere secret and safe and let a few safe successors know how to recover it if you dissapear.
Who could replace Steve Jobs? Any of Apple's leaders could!
blog posted by lxpk Thu, 2008-03-06 14:51There's an article on AppleInsider about how Jobs ensures Apple's successors for leadership by making sure all the leaders get involved in the full spectrum meeting, not just their own domains. I like the idea of making sure everyone gets involved in many areas of an organization so that if someone wants to take a break they don't feel enslaved to their responsibilities because no one else can do it as well.
In his discussion with Fortune, Jobs notes that top staff at the company meet every Monday to review the company's entire direction for the past week -- a practice not often seen at other companies, but one which the company co-founder says is essential to coordinating the larger company strategy and fostering independence among the others.
"When you hire really good people you have to give them a piece of the business and let them run with it," he says. "I want [them] making as good or better decisions than I would. So the way to do that is to have them know everything, not just in their part of the business, but in every part of the business."
The technique explains Jobs' confidence in finding a replacement should he ever leave. Echoing his remarks made on Tuesday at the annual shareholders' meeting, Jobs observes that there are multiple prime candidates for the top spot, particularly chief operating officer Tim Cook. Senior officials at Apple are reportedly skilled enough that there would be little risk. "Some people say, 'Oh, God, if [he] got run over by a bus, Apple would be in trouble," Jobs adds jokingly. "But there are really capable people at Apple."
He also uses this approach as justification for his at times legendary reputation for harsh criticism. Pushing employees to their limits improves them beyond what they thought possible of themselves, he says.
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