Core Focus Areas... Recruitment, Development, Organisational Design

Building a strong executive bench requires an organisation to consider its organisation design, business strategy, recruitment, development and retention of key executives as core focus areas.  Standard replacement planning efforts at most organizations result in an exposure to four critical succession risks:

Vacancy risk:
Is there a risk of any critical leadership positions remaining vacant?  This may be due to the scarcity of the skill set available in the industry or due to lack of information on the management’s part in prioritizing the required skill set and identifying turnover risks. 

Portfolio risk:
This involves the risk of poor deployment of talent to meet an organisation’s business goals and can often lead to managers being unable to meet evolving business priorities.  A major contributor to such a scenario is the organisation’s inability to take changing business needs in to account.

Readiness risk:
Arises from the lack of development of possible successors who have limited understanding of the required skill level to take over the new leadership role.  The chief reason for such a risk arising is a high turnover. 

Transition risk:
Arises when the new leader is unable to assimilate into the organisation successfully.  This may be due to poor on-boarding to the new leader and due to lack of accountability and developmental activities early on in new role and action plans.