Succession Planning for your Company’s Long-Term Success

Do you know that many businesses in Nigeria do not make it to the next generation because they do not have a succession planning strategy?

What Is Succession Planning?

Succession planning is the strategy for identifying and developing future leaders for major roles at all levels in your company.

There have been many cases of skilled old leaders resigning, retiring or dying without a successor to take on their role effectively.

Is your company prepared for succession emergencies?

Under the best circumstances, surviving a leadership transition could be challenging. Studies have proven that leadership transition planning is often ignored despite it being a critical corporate function. We understand that the company’s main focus is revenue yielding, therefore, succession planning appears to be a challenging and time-consuming process – best left to tomorrow. Many high-profile CEOs and company founders are guilty of never putting this into consideration while creating/refreshing their business strategy. The side effect of this is often detrimental when a succession emergency arises.

Succession planning requires time for lengthy deliberation, training, searches, debates on strategic company objectives, and finding the best talent for the role.

You should be more preemptive in defining the company’s future success and accept the certainty of leadership succession in principle – besides no CEO lives forever. This opportunity can be utilized to shape the future direction of your company and solidify company culture, financial returns, long-term growth strategy, and sustainability.

You should consider the following steps while planning the long-term success of your company.

1.   Plan Ahead For Emergency Successions 

Westsons can help you plan ahead for emergency successions, implementing our proven methodology. We can identify the core skills and groom your successor to effectively fill in the shoes.

This will stabilize your company when faced with a dramatic change in corporate leadership. Sudden shift in leadership can be emotional for your Board members, employees, and clients. If care is not taken, this will affect the functionality of the company, create financial instability and loss of prominent clients.

2.   Build Sustainable Leadership 

Leadership succession planning is critical to any company’s long-term success. We advise that succession planning becomes part of your management review and compensation process. These can be done multiple times to make the right succession decisions. Westsons will take the time to groom potential internal candidates to encourage growth, development, and opportunity while keeping an eye on maintaining stability if the worst happens.

Although succession plans can be prepared separately from your overall business strategy, it also covers the company’s mission, short and long-term business strategies, executive compensation, talent development, corporate governance requirements, crisis management, corporate communications, and compliance policies.

3.   Understand and Adopt Critical Elements of a Succession Plan 

Westsons encourage you to put together a checklist of interim leaders and mission-critical schemes. Other key points to note are: who will be driving interim decisions, what decisions need to be made in the short and medium-term, the appropriate governance, corporate and other legal rules to follow, and how any decisions will be communicated (internal and external).