Page 44 - MiNDSPACE Issue 1 2022 - Old Mutual Corporate

leadership workSPACE
planning or simulations can provide the live challenges that this pandemic offers. The next leaders have surfaced and been moulded for you. Take advantage of the rich learnings this situation offers
to build a succession-planning process that identifies, recognises, rewards, values and grows worthy successors.
Today, organisations need to move fast just to stand still. An MIT Sloan survey demonstrated that while 82% of respondents believe their organisation needs digitally savvy leaders, at the most 12% believe they have leaders with the right aptitudes and attitudes
to thrive in the digital economy. Beyond investing in emerging technologies to keep pace with change, organisations must identify and develop the right leadership successors from the ground up
to manage and secure their place in a digital future.
‘Many succession slates consist of people who are perfectly suited to lead the past.’
3 STEPS TOWARDS BETTER SUCCESSION MANAGEMENT
Step 1: Build adaptive and disruptive competencies
and capabilities
Add specific enterprise-wide adaptive and disruptive leadership qualities to your leadership DNA, and ensure that they are built into your competency framework and assessment model. They are related to, but not limited
to. mental agility (an entrepreneurial, future-oriented and innovation- driven mindset including critical and creative thinking); people agility (empathy and emotional intelligence); results agility (driving for success); and change agility (resilience, adaptability and flexibility).
Step 2: Audit and optimise for these competencies
and capabilities
Integrate these qualities into your succession-management tools such as the McKinsey nine-box or four-box matrix to assess performance and potential. Conduct both a competency and a succession audit of where and to what extent these qualities already exist. If there are gaps, translate them into individual development action plans.
Continuously ideate, test, prototype and apply learning models that amplify these leadership qualities, not just in the C-suite, but across the entire organisation so that you continue to build a healthy, future- fit succession pipeline. M
Step 3: Regularly test succession plans and successors
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