Page 43 - MiNDSPACE Issue 1 2022 - Old Mutual Corporate

any senior business leaders are hanging up their hats. They are joining The Great Resignation Boom in search of different lifestyles, leaving leadership vacuums and succession gaps in their wake. This, of course, presents a host of challenges. Your successors are often the people you have invested in the most. Learning and skills development, C-suite access, business-strategy formulation and board exposure are all directed to this senior team. Replacing and rebuilding lost talent at this level
WHERE CAN YOU FIND THIS POOL
OF LEADERS?
They are inside your organisation – hidden within the layers of hierarchy. Until now. The pandemic has asked much of us, but it has also surfaced the best of us. Surviving digital disruption and Covid-19 itself, competing in a new world of hybrid work, addressing the climate emergency, managing shocks and crises – dealing with all this has become just another day at the office for top teams.
is a difficult, time-consuming and often expensive exercise that hampers efforts to recover from the current crisis.
Apart from their own day jobs, these frontline and back-office stars have tirelessly been serving on task forces, response teams, risk committees and strategic work streams. Covid has brought to the fore these unsung heroes who, because they may have previously been invisible to the C-suite, probably never featured on leadership succession slates. But they should, because according to McKinsey research, top performers in complex occupations contribute disproportionately to a company’s success – 800% more when compared to lower performers.
We must, however, be cautious not to solve
the wrong problem. Notwithstanding the need to train the next level of leaders to fill the succession void, the digital transformation of the workplace accelerated by Covid-19 means that new skills are needed across all levels of the organisation, as business models and roles change. Instead
of lamenting the rapidly diminishing succession slate, the vital question to ask is whether current succession planning processes have surfaced the best future leaders?
Transformative experiences are invaluable in the journey of a leader. Covid-19 is one such experience. No amount of stress testing, scenario
workSPACE leadership
M
are perfectly suited to lead the past. What we need are leaders who can lead the future. Today’s leadership succession plans must consider what relevant competencies (the knowledge, attributes and skills needed to do a job) and capabilities (the ability to integrate and flex knowledge and skills
to meet future unknowns) are needed throughout the organisation to broaden the pool and become future-ready.
Historically, succession planning was only targeted at C-suite and senior leadership, thus reinforcing existing business models, legacy best practices, continuity and stability. As a result, many succession slates consist of people who
Roze Phillips is an African futurist, Executive Director of Value Creation at the Gordon Institute of Business Science and founder of Abundance@ Work. She advises corporates on the future of work and regularly does workshops, talks and lectures on the topic.
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