Report: In Business, Expect the Unexpected

When there’s a sudden, unexpected gap in leadership, business operations can go haywire.

Having a detailed succession plan is the blueprint to keep everything running smoothly.

Imagine a scenario where the leader of your organization has stepped down without advance notice and nobody is ready to take their place. Or a similar situation: a company finds itself at a loss when an owner who kept his leadership expertise entirely to himself winds up in the hospital unexpectedly for several months.

These are just two examples of why succession planning is essential for any size organization. And they’re both examples that Jevon Powell, an organizational psy- chologist and president, owner and senior consultant of Seattle-based firm Scontrino Powell, has seen over his nearly 30 years in the business.

In the first scenario, Powell says, “the organization was caught kind of flat-footed. They had to go to a temporary or an interim president. Now they’re being more thoughtful about what their next president needs to look like.” In the second scenario, he says, the leader’s “organization almost collapsed in his absence because nobody could take over his job.”

“Effective, consistent succession planning helps prevent significant gaps in leadership, so if somebody leaves unexpectedly, we know what to do,” Powell says. Succession planning is the process of identifying key positions in an organization and nurturing a talent pipeline to potentially fill those positions as the need arises.

As the scenarios above indicate, succession planning helps companies avoid gaps in business operations, loss of institutional knowledge or unnecessarily bumpy leadership transitions. It engages employees and adds value to organizations.

“There’s a lot of research that highlights the importance of succession planning,” Powell says. “There is less consistent research around exactly which tools are going to be the most useful or the most effective. But certainly... one of management’s prime responsibilities is to ensure that they have a succession plan in place.”

So how does an organization go about doing that?

Read the full story in SUCCESS+ magazine