By Tony Thelen
If you own your own business and are successful for any length of time, eventually you will be faced with a leadership transition. Maybe it’s you personally who are ready to move on, or perhaps a situation arises for someone on your team. No matter when it happens, leadership transition is fraught with anxiety, stress and potentially harmful impacts to your customers and your business. To put the odds in your favor of pulling off a successful transition, keep in mind the following points.
- Think well ahead. The time to think about a leadership transition begins years before you need to execute a change in leadership. Developing people to assume a leadership role can involve giving them one or more job rotations and careful mentoring and coaching in these roles. A key job responsibility for any business owner is to ensure the survivability of the firm. Job one is to make sure you always have capable leaders in place, and to always be developing a bench of leadership competency.
- Plan for every key position. For all key leadership roles, have a plan. A good plan should include someone who can step in immediately, someone who is 1-3 years away from being ready and several who are in the pipeline 3+ years away. As time goes on and people develop, update your list to reflect your bench strength.
- Assess your talent. Taking the time to both qualitatively and quantitatively assess your leadership bench can not only save you from making poor decisions in appointing leaders, but it can provide an outstanding development roadmap for leaders to close gaps and improve performance. A good qualitative approach is to perform 360 interviews from people who interact with potential leaders. Two excellent quantitative assessments are the Hogan Assessments (www.hoganassessments.com) and The Leadership Circle (www.theleadershipcircle.com). Both of these will provide insights into the probability of success for a candidate in a leadership role, as well as inform a prospective leader what to work on to improve.