The Boston Matrix

Succession planning. “What the heck is that?!”, I hear you ask. For those of you who know, it is not such a big and scary concept as it may first seem. You may envision lots of people scrawling about as if impending doom is approaching. This isn’t the case – however without a succession plan, impending doom would be a word to describe the reality. A succession plan is simply the course of action that takes place once the owner or CEO of the organisation steps down, retires or can no longer fulfil the role. There is a four step process that can be used to build a succession plan, which I will break down below.

Defining the requirements

You don’t want a headless chicken calling all of the shots at the top of the hierarchy. It is important to create a person specification based on the current role, which gives the company an idea what experience, responsibilities and characteristics a potential candidate would need to possess in order to succeed in the role.

The grand ‘Search’

Business have two avenues of recruitment to take: internal or external. The people in charge of identifying successors can look internally for candidates or use external agencies to locate and identify external candidates. Any participant would have to undergo scrutinisation from the team to ensure they are a suitable fit and fulfil the requirements detailed above. There are benefits and drawbacks from internal and external hiring – which you can learn about here (will link when I get round to writing the post 🙂

A Rigorous Selection

In order to choose the best fit, it’s crucial for businesses to utilise multiple specialists to identify and evaluate candidate strengths and weaknesses. This helps to build a basis for comparison and set a benchmark for what candidates should reach in order to find the most suitable one for the role.

The big ‘Transition’

Once all candidates have been taken into account and a decision is made and communicated to the rest of the organisation, the successor will undergo training and ‘shadowing’ to prepare for that final handover, so they are best prepared to take over all the responsibilities most effectively.

All this sounds great, but what’s the point?

Apart from having a clear plan to help out in times of uncertainty or change bringing confidence to the business and stakeholders, not having a succession plan can have detrimental effects on the business, especially when departures from those at the top happen rapidly, for example when Tesco was left without a chief executive (after Philip Clarke left) and a chief financial officer (after Laurie McIlwee resigned) in the 2014 crisis, and had no plan as to who to appoint. They desperately appointed “Drastic Dave” Lewis, nicknamed such after his time and actions at Unilever.

To conclude, no matter the size of the business, it’s always essential to have an idea of who is going to be the successor of any business. For my grandfather, that succession plan included selling his business to my mum and my uncle who would take the reigns and move the business forward. Without an idea of what might happen when someone needs to step back, it can significantly disrupt the operations of any organisation.