Corporate Succession Planning Consultants
The frame of reference for our expertise in this area is based on:
Hands-on corporate experience from large international companies building succession plans for top 100 executives
+1000 in-depth executive assessments for C-level succession
+20 years’ experience in building models to forecasting the needs of executives for the future
We support organizations in building their succession planning process and conducting executive assessments.
Why Many Organizations Struggle With Succession Planning
A Framework for Executive Succession Planning
The term succession planning is interpreted and applied in many different ways. Whereas we can appreciate most of the practices we have come across, most of them fail to take a holistic approach to management succession planning. Often, they are governed by one specific objective only, driven by one executive who is short-term oriented or only focuses on replacing a soon-to-retire CEO.
We urge organizations to look at succession planning like any other business-critical planning process and include it in quarterly business strategy reviews. This also includes taking both an operational, tactical and strategic approach to succession management and planning.
Operational Succession Planning
Operational succession planning has a time horizon of immediate nature. This is where you ensure that you have a list of immediate potential successor candidates for different senior positions and key positions. This is important to have in place in order to be able to manage sudden unexpected resignations.
Tactical Succession Planning
Tactical succession planning has a time horizon of one to five years. This is where you look three to five years ahead and start planning who could potentially take what positions three or five years from now. But even more important, you actively use positions in the organization to develop and prepare the people in question.
Strategic Succession Planning
Strategic succession planning has a time horizon of five to ten years or even longer. This is where you build the Leadership Pipeline framework into your recruitment process, your performance management process and the leadership development process.
How We Work With Organizations
We have specialized in supporting organizations in implementing succession planning at all three levels. There are different approaches to implementing the Leadership Pipeline principles. Also, different organizations have different sweet spots for starting the implementation. We work with your organization on your terms, and we start where it is most important for your business goals. The scope of our role depends on your needs and the internal resources you have in place for the project.
Our contribution would most often focus on:
Designing and implementing the succession planning process
Building the succession planning process into the business review process
Creating a succession planning forecast model for the organization
Defining performance standards for different leadership roles
Implementing a structured and strategic recruitment process
Conducting Leadership Transition Assessments
Most companies start with two or three of the above initiatives. The extent of our involvement in each area varies from assignment to assignment. We have provided international succession planning services in over 20+ countries. Speak with one of our enterprise succession planning consultants to learn more.