Waiting for forever to succeed your boss?
The market is the answer for successors.
Are you one of those smart leaders who has been on the succession plan of your boss for the more than a couple of years now?
Do you wonder how long it will take before the plan turns into reality?
You may be one of those senior leaders who think that a succession planning exercise is a career development effort.
It is not.
Succession planning is a contingency planning process.
It is designed to ensure that the company has a replacement plan for each position. Yes, it could lead to a development plan for you, but that too is a contingency planning process: To ensure that you are ready.
The goal of all succession planning is to manage the contingency of sudden loss of talent. The company will, therefore, do whatever it takes to meet that goal. This could include hiring from outside the company or shifting to another person within the company, for reasons that make sense at the time when the need arises, not for reasons considered at the time when the succession planning deck was made.
Because of the contingency nature of succession planning processes, a significant number of C-Level positions are not filled by people who were the designated successors.
Successors who continue to wait for internal promotions run the risk of getting passed over. The window of opportunity for succeeding to a level or a role is normally quite short. This fact, combined with the fact that executives have limited career spans, means that access to the market is the best option for aspiring leaders.
The market is a much better friend than the internal succession plan.
Most successors, blinded by their need to succeed their boss, fail to realize that there are other companies that value their capabilities higher than their current firm: Companies that are smaller, companies looking for specific experience or companies looking to upgrade their talent. All these organizations value the successor more than the current company does. Many may be able to pay much better and may even be on a faster growth track than the current company.
Many successors do not access the market for fear of losing the ‘equity’ they may have built within the current company. They also fear the loss of some of the retention handcuffs that may be part of their compensation package. Then, of course, is the simple inertia related to being comfortable and ‘feeling valued.’
Such successors, comfortable in the chairs, surrounded by their admiring teams, miss out crucial realities of corporate life.
· A C-level job is not just another job at the next level. It is whole different world of empowerment, leadership and self-esteem.
· There is a limited time period during which a successor may be considered a worthy C-level leader.
In the next article, we will discuss why the current leadership market is not designed to help successors and why that may be a problem for leaders and for companies.
