Many 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 is difficult, time-consuming and often expensive.

Developing leaders

We must, however, be cautious not to solve the wrong problem. Instead of lamenting the rapidly diminishing succession slate, the vital question to ask is whether current succession planning processes have produced the best future leaders?

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 are perfectly suited to lead the past.

But 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.

Aptitude and attitude

The pandemic provided a live challenge and in many organisations this has produced the next generation of leaders. Savvy leaders will take advantage of the rich learnings the situation has offered to build a planning process that identifies, recognises, rewards, values and grows worthy successors.

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.

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.

Step 3: Regularly test succession plans and successors

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.

This article originally appeared in MiNDSPACE issue 1 2022 magazine. Read more here.