Hi, my name is Mark Mitford and I spent 20 plus years working as an HR executive in corporate America with many fortune five hundreds and several middle market sized companies. If you're a small business owner, CEO, or other professional, given the task of solving your company's HR issues and problems, then you're in the right place. Today our episode is going to be focused on succession planning. Let's go ahead and get started.
So I wanted to go ahead And cover this in a couple of different components. First of all, what is succession planning? Why is it important and how to implement it? So every company, so first of all, so what is succession planning? Every company, regardless of its side. As a matter, if you have 50 employees, a hundred employees or 500 employees or a thousand employees, you need to have a succession plan within your organization.
So succession planning, when you think about it, it's actually looking at identifying a couple of different things. You're really focused on understanding the leadership landscape within your organization. So who are your top leaders and who are the people that could possibly assume their roles if something happened to one of your top leaders and it happens time and time again, because some people may say, and occasionally we'll have clients that will Mark.
You know, I'm, I'm running the company. I'm the CEO of the company, the owner of the company. And I'm 20. Um , you know, I'm 45 years old or I'm 50 years old, I'm in great health, but guess what? Something could happen. Uh, you know, and you don't want to have any, you know, you don't want to think about those things, but you do need to think about them from a business perspective.
What happens if something happens to the top leader, they get in a car accident, they end up having, you know, getting cancer. They ended up with something else to where that person can no longer run the business successfully. Then you've got to have a plan as to what would happen with that situation and who would be taking over the reins of the company. And a lot of the companies that I work with they're smaller. So they're anywhere between 50 to 250 or 300 employees.
And they have not done a good job of succession planning. So the key thing is, you know, why do you need it? And what is it? First of all, succession planning is really understanding your talent, understanding that. So even if you're thinking about it, so one of the best examples would be taking, you know, take an NFL team. If the quarterback goes down, the quarterback gets injured. So I live in Dallas. So the Dallas Cowboys, what happened this year, Dak Prescott had a season ending injury.
They don't just sit there and figure out when that happens. Who's going to go in and play quarterback. They have a second quarterback and they have a third string quarterback and fourth string quarterback. You've gotta be thinking about succession planning for your company, just the same as any kind of football team.
Doesn't matter if it's a high school team, college team or professional team in the NFL, you've got to have your number two and your number three options available at a moment's notice. So that's what, when you focus on succession planning, that's what it is. Why is it important? Because as we mentioned before, something could happen at a moment's notice with the individual running the company.
And again, something very bad could happen to that individual where they can no longer run the company. And it does not a, an intentional plan as to who would be the next person to run the company. Then that could be a huge deficiency or a huge negative within the organization. And what do you need to be doing with the people as you go through the succession planning process?
You know, it's important to identify who those people are and you've gotta be training them and grooming them to possibly take over the organization. And in a lot of cases to this needed, because at some point the owner or the CEO is going to retire. And so planning for that situation at that, owner's going to plan to retire at 65 years old.
It's critical to make sure that maybe even if that person's in their late fifties or 60 years old, that person's already methodically thinking about who would take over the company when I retire, because I know that every CEO wants to retire at some point, even though quite a few of them, won't admit it , they do. And so it's making sure that you have that intentional plan as to who would be taking over the business and making sure you get them exposure to different facets of the business.
They may not be that I'm comfortable with. So good example of that is if you have your, if you're a CFO or your head of operations is kind of tapped on the shoulders to possibly , uh , take over the reigns of the company when the CEO retires, making sure they both understand who the clients are, who your top customers are, they start building relationship with your top customers. And so when that person leaves, they've already established a relationship with our customers.
So there isn't any, there isn't any major dip in productivity, or there's a smooth transition between the owner and their person. Who's going to succeed to take over the reins when they retire. The last thing to do that I wanted to focus on today is how do you implement it so that you can say, well, Mark, this is great to understand what it is and why it's important, but how do we do this? That is something too that you just have to do in a very intentional basis.
I always recommend you do this on an annualized basis because you may find I've actually had a client recently go through succession planning again. And this was just the second time we worked with them to go through succession planning and guess what? They actually had significant changes and the leadership that they were actually doing, the succession planning process with some new people came some , um , other people left, some people were promoted into different jobs.
And so your organization is not a static organization. Your organization is dynamic. It is continually changing and morphing. So guess what, that's why you have to do this on Lisa an annualized basis. Because even if you're a company with 150 or 200 employees, you're going to continuously have changes in the leadership rank. And that's why you need to refresh, refresh your succession plan.
The other key thing you need to be thinking about is understanding not only who are your who your top talent is, and who's going to be possibly replacing your , a key executive on your team, not just the CEO, but possibly the head of finance, the head of operations, the head of sales. So looking at your , all your core leadership team positions, and then you also need to be focused on the other, the last facet we'll talk about today, why it's so critical is who are your high potentials?
Who are the diamonds in the rough, who are starting to progress quickly within the organization? And what are you going to try to do for them? If you're going to do anything special for them around career development, or perhaps training or mentoring, what are you doing for those folks to continue to challenge them and retain them? So you're really doing succession planning for two basic reasons.
The first off is understanding your talent landscape and making sure you understand clearly who would be the possible person to take over any position on the leadership team, if something happened to that individual.
And then the other thing you want to focus on who are the high potentials, who are people who are perhaps, you know, in their twenties or thirties or forties, who can , can quickly be promoted and possibly aggressively promoted to take on jobs that are much bigger than the job they're currently residing in, and how do you identify them?
And then you put together a game plan and a development plan for them to actually help them to grow and develop and to retain those individuals because it's the most impact Or to retain those individuals. So that's what I wanted to talk about today. So that pretty much covers it for today. Thanks for listening for more on all things pertaining to HR, visit our website, HRcatalystconsulting.com. And don't forget to like us subscribe to our podcast until next time. This is Mark Mitford .
Thanks so much for listening and take care. Bye .