Succession planning should be apart of every associations Strategic Plan. It is your vision of where the association will be going in the future. When succession planning is done successfully the expectations will be know to its future leadership. Here are some of our thoughts on how to make leadership succession a more relevant process in your association.
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Every key position and key person in your organization is a candidate for a succession plan. The important impact is that it is virtually imposible to successfully promote somene unless there is a trained person to take over the position being vacated.
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Pay attention to what gets measured and what gets rewarded within your association. If leadership development is not enough of a priority for the association to establish goals and track progress against those goals, it will be difficult to make any succession planning process work.
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Keep the succession planning simple. Since the planning process is only a precursor to focus the development, it doesn’t need to be perfect. More sophisticated assessments can be built into the development process and administered by a competent mentor.
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Review the succession plan to ensure its effectiveness. Succession planning must be ongoing and not an annual look-see. The challenge is to have a plan adaptable to the dynamic nature of the succession process and the shifting demands on the positions. As with any other sort of plan, the hard part is actually executing it.
