Effective Succession Planning: Emergency, Planned, and Ongoing Leadership Development (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: You know, if you're doing succession planning right, you should actually have three different types of plans in place. One is for emergency succession planning. This is a process that's in place in case of a sudden departure of a key leadership team member. There's also planned succession planning, and that's really the process that's put in place for a specific planned departure. And then there's the ongoing leadership development that we discussed too, the ongoing practice to really attract, develop, and retain top talent as well. I think first and foremost, just really be proactive, intentional, systematic. Don't wait until that last moment and try not to be reactive. Another kind of best practice or principle is really creating accountability. You know, you can create committees, you know, so it's not even kind of the burden isn't on any one single individual, but you know, create committees to take accountability for succession planning or executive search, you know, which could be a mix of board members and senior level staff. You know, another kind of key principle is really creating various scenarios. We always plan for the future given the information we have today, but there's always going to be unknowns and it's good to draw out a few high likelihood scenarios. Another kind of key principle is really ensuring that all these initiatives are time bound with objective milestones indicators that show success and possible risks as well. These objective, you know, milestones and indicators are also key for board members to, you know, govern and review as well, or the committee or whoever's taking accountability there. This is a little bit more action oriented, but what we've seen also organizations do and what we often advise is really identify these critical roles that are out there that can put the organization at high risk, build these successor profiles, you know, and what is that kind of archetype of the leader that should be filling that role, look internally and actually identify these potential successors, you know, that can actually grow into this role, assess their development needs, what are the gaps that they kind of have and what are those areas for improvement, and then really very consciously and actively provide them opportunities to build those skill sets and so forth. So that's another kind of best practice that we often see and advise nonprofits when looking at succession planning.