Many companies and organizations conduct succession planning efforts. This work examines critical roles and critical people and describes what is needed as a leader. At the same time, organizations design, create, and run high-potential development efforts. Those high-potentials could and should become the next successors. The challenge is to capture and utilize all that good, insightful information on leadership that succession planning efforts reveal and bring it into high-potential efforts. You need to identify it, distill it, and translate it into those development efforts. This blog will describe three practical areas to tackle so that you mine your succession planning efforts well and find that development gold.

Idea 1: Identify

Throughout a succession planning effort, all kinds of leadership information is described, used, discussed, created, and even revealed. Each organization has its own definition of leadership. It is often built around good, commonly known profiles of what a good leader looks like. However, there are those unique, particular elements that describe your organization and what successful leadership looks like – what a leader does and how they communicate. This brings us to our first idea: identify those leadership descriptors.

As succession planning work and discussions happen, be on the lookout for those leadership descriptions and capture them. Seriously, write them down. This is the type of thing that if you wait too long, it gets forgotten. Don’t worry about completeness or which ideas will be ultimately used; consider it brainstorming. That is the key idea at this point – collect, collect, and collect some more. This is shows you what makes incumbents and successors strong leaders and that is important to know and capture.

Idea 2: Distill

This brings us to the second idea – distill it. All of us know, or should know, brainstorming can be quite productive and helpful – that’s what you did in the first part. We’ve collected many ideas – too many. This is a critical point because as the saying goes, we don’t want to and can’t “boil the ocean.” It’s not helpful to the high-potential development effort to have ideas all over the place covering everything. The key thing is to distill the various aspects of leadership into those critical few attributes. This is hard! It means making choices – and that is not easy. Many times, we like all the ideas. The identify idea has the attribute of being and staying open. The distilling idea has the attribute of choosing, selecting, and closing. The way to make choices easier is to keep the end in mind. Use the end point of high-potential development to select key themes and leadership attributes for high potentials.

Idea 3: Involve Senior Leaders

With key leadership themes and attributes identified and distilled, it’s time to bring them into your high-potential development efforts. We won’t go into full design ideas in this blog, but we want to highlight and describe a particularly powerful one that goes overlooked and underutilized: involving senior leaders. It’s powerful to have senior leaders talk about specific leadership attributes and how they work with it. It brings the ideas to life with stories and examples. It engages your high-potential audience. Having your participants hear from senior leaders on how they tackle a specific leadership attribute shows others what it means at your organization. Often leaders share war stories and participants identify with those instantly.

Bringing the Model to Life

There are many ways to bring this role model idea into the high-potential efforts. In fact, this is a spot to get creative! For example, they could be a guest speaker at a group workshop that’s part of a program. It becomes a section on the agenda devoted to hearing from and interacting with a senior leader role model. Alternatively, you could design a stand-alone talk or webinar using the topic. That creates variety in learning delivery approaches, which can resonate with certain participants. Taking that idea one step further, you could design and make it a panel of role models. There are many ways to go about it.

You don’t need to do this with every topic being used in a program. We’ve utilized a senior leader for just one select topic that was critical to an organization at that time. The power of this is that it brings to life key leadership attributes in direct, real context of your own organization.

There is one critical preparation idea to mention. You need to work with the senior leader ahead of him or her participating in a program. Don’t do this on the fly or cold. The key idea is to work with the senior leader so that they have the full context of the development efforts, know what to emphasize, and can illustrate and talk about their experience with it.

As an example of identifying, distilling, and using the above, one succession planning effort at an organization we worked with kept revealing how successful leaders were proactive with their communication. In example after example, there was a proactive element that successful leaders demonstrated. In the distillation phase, it became “Communicate Up, Down, and Across.” This had real meaning for this organization, and we designed it into development programs for many years. In fact, communication role models were used several times!

The critical idea is to take advantage of the good information from a succession planning effort and translate it into high-potential development. Remembering to collect, identify, and distill will align your succession planning efforts more tightly into your high-potential development efforts. Succession planning is an opportunity-rich environment if you remember to see and utilize it – that is, mine it!

Keystone Partners: Your Partners in Succession Planning

Keystone Partners has over 40 years’ experience supporting organizational succession planning through every stage, from assessment to action. Those that wait for major disruptions to occur lose the advantage of time to develop a successful transition. Interested in learning more? Contact us today to find out how we can help your organization realize the full potential of your people.

So, all those meetings and calls, but collaboration is down?
In one sense, it makes a lot of sense. We moved into a highly reactive mode and by necessity are in a get-it-done mode -very task oriented.

However, as the work-from-home weeks continue due to health concerns resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to increase our collaboration to get our best thinking for these times. We can increase our collaboration, but we need to make it happen. We have to put in some effort and energy and be purposeful about it. The idea is to create ad hoc “bump into” calls.

Given we are separated, we tend to default to “scheduled” calls and video-meetings. If it is scheduled on our calendar we participate, but then drop back into task mode. We also do a lot of quick hit texting and instant messaging. Also, there is a psychological hurdle to reaching out. It takes effort on your part.

The key is to reach out and then talk live -just a call or video if it helps.

Two types of outreach -just connecting and work-based.
On just connecting, or the relationship side, it’s about having a short call and simply touching base. Talk about things going on, no particular agenda or pre-identified topics. Think of it like bumping into someone in the office kitchen grabbing coffee or at the water cooler.

If you have a work topic, where in the normal course of business, you would run things by others, do some of that in one of these calls. We are defaulting to everything thru email, but things like brainstorming, talking thru alternatives, or talking about decision options, to name just three, work much better live -at least in the early stages. In a live call, you benefit from the back and forth exchange of ideas. You can discuss new ideas and flesh things out. Also, with all of our new-found skill at video calls, leverage the screen sharing capability to review documents, spreadsheets, designs, and project plans, and really talk them thru.

In both cases, reach out to setup a quick call. Use your messaging system to ask “are you available for a quick connect call?” If you can see their calendar, offer a good time when they are open. “Hey, can you talk at 2, I want to pick your brain.”

To make it easy, think of a few people you would consult when in the office, i.e., make a short list of people whose experience, opinions, and perspective you value. Every so often reach out to the people on your list. Because we are good at doing what’s on our calendar, let’s use that fact and put in a calendar reminder to make some ad hoc collaboration calls. It might sound strange to schedule an “ad hoc” call, but the technique works. Not only will colleagues appreciate the connection, but so will you!

Currently there is no law or government regulation on the term “coach” and so anyone can present himself or herself as having this professional identity. There are a growing number of sound training and certification programs for coaches, and the ICF has emerged as the primary accrediting body for the field. But many excellent coaches are not certified at all. Conversely, some who are certified may not be very skilled or qualified for the work they do.

How can a potential client navigate through this mess and identify a coach who can provide a beneficial professional service in accordance with best practices? There are numerous differentiating factors that one can consider when selecting a coach. Reasons to believe that a coach has the skills and credibility to provide appropriate services can be established by examining the following criteria:

1. Experience and credentials: Strong coaches generally have extensive academic backgrounds and work experience. They can evolve out of virtually any vocation or career. Clients should take a look at what the coach has done and how well he or she has done it. A great coach has demonstrated expertise in one or more fields, as well as a capacity to collaborate with others and to lead teams or organizations. Distinctive credentials may be a higher education degree (such as an MBA or PhD), a professional license (such as a license to practice law or medicine), certification from reputable accrediting bodies (such as ICF), or other relevant certifications in their fields of practice (such as a CFA). Since anyone can label himself or herself a “coach,” these differentiating characteristics are a sound starting point to identify possible coaches.
2. Affiliations: Professional coaches can gain credibility by associating themselves with companies and organizations who know how to vet them. For example, coaches who work as Associates for well-established consulting firms have credibility on the basis of the fact that they were brought on board by the firm in the first place. Potential clients may look to professional services firms for a curated list of competent and well-respected coaches whose work has received a stamp of approval from their peers. Other affiliations that can add credibility could include membership or leadership roles in reputable coaching organizations, such as the ICF and other professional associations (she as SHRM or the American Management Association).
3. Word of mouth and testimonials: Once it is clear that a potential coach has relevant credentials and affiliations, it is prudent to seek information about their actual work with clients. Do their credentials and affiliations actually translate into an ability to connect well with clients and to provide a robust, practical experience that yields good results? Coaching is not an Ivory Tower exercise. Clients should enter coaching with the confidence that an engagement can lead to concrete changes in mindset and behavior — and ultimately to significant career and personal growth. Honest feedback from others with direct experience working with the coach is pure gold.
4. Online presence: A coach’s skill and credibility can be nicely assessed via a thorough Internet search. “Googling” the coach can reveal lots of relevant information if the coach has a website, LinkedIn profile, social media (such as Twitter or Facebook), YouTube videos, or other online content that might provide a window into his or her background, experience, work style, and personality. It is increasingly unlikely these days that a serious professional coach won’t have a substantial Internet presence, with at least some of these online resources. Clients seeking a coach should definitely seek information in this fashion.
5. Articles and presentations: When coaches publish and make public presentations on their work, they both establish their credibility and share important perspectives on their approach to coaching. It’s worthwhile to find out whether coaches have published articles in reputable journals or blogs, authored a book or produced other unique written content, given TED talks or other invited presentations, or otherwise found a way to share their knowledge and expertise with the world beyond their individual clients.

Each of these criteria can help clients differentiate a potential coach from thousands of others in an increasingly saturated marketplace. Once these criteria have been applied and a client has identified a handful of coaches who fit the bill, an entirely new factor should come into play as perhaps the final basis of coach selection: personal chemistry. Coaching is most successful when there is a strong rapport between client and coach. The client should look forward to stimulating, thought provoking, challenging, and fun conversations with the coach. When this kind of emotional and personal bond is in place, the coaching experience can be transformational, with major positive impact on the quality of the client’s work and personal life experience.

Okay, we are just over two months into the new year. Remember those New Year’s resolutions (i.e. your goals). Many of us make New Year’s Resolutions and by now, unfortunately, many of us have given up on them. Let’s do something about that.

Now, is a good time to revisit your goals. Instead of giving up completely, let’s adjust. If we can start thinking about taking stock and making adjustments, we have far better chances of achieving our goals. Any good sports team does this all time. They start with a plan, then when things don’t work they make adjustments. We need to bring that mentality to hitting our goals.

Start with taking stock of where you are with your goals. Where are you making progress and where are things slipping? Do a bit of reflection on your efforts and progress to date.

Then, consider three adjustments.

Adjustment 1

Adjust the goals if needed. Make sure your goals are specific and actionable and not too general. e.g. “be healthy,” while admirable, is a tad too general; make it more specific to something like workout for 30 minutes 4 times each week.

Adjustment 2

Make working on the goal easy. This adjustment is about they way you achieve the goal. Is it easy to work on it, or do you have a large start-up every time you start? Where do you need to adjust a routine? Make sure you have the tools and routine so that you can easily work on your goals.

Adjustment 3

Shift your thinking to incremental progress. One trap we can fall into is thinking all or nothing on working on a goal. “I’m really falling behind on this goal so why bother?” We can see things slipping and that initial burst of will drops off. Instead of giving up completely, think of incremental progress you can make. A simple example is around workouts, a person might have trouble with a 45 minute work, but could “squeeze” in a 30 minute one. 30 minutes beats zero by a mile. Look at your specific goals and see where an incremental approach helps. Build some momentum.

By adjusting, you have a better chance of making progress toward your goals and ultimately reaching them. Keep taking stock and look for adjustments you can make as the year progresses.