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Where do you want your company to be in three years? Most of my successful construction clients have a pretty clear answer to that question. They understand that, big or small, to ensure long-term profitability you need to address who will replace whom and to map out the path each individual will need to take to realize both individual and organizational success.
A well-designed talent strategy defines the critical moves you will need to make and develops a timeline for individuals to develop skills and gain experience to move forward. Understanding the succession planning process is the first step. Building confidence among stakeholders that you are indeed promoting the most qualified candidates is the next. As Winston Churchill advised, "Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning."
What is succession planning and who needs it?
Many people use the terms replacement planning and succession planning synonymously, but the two differ. Convincing decision makers to have a disaster replacement plan in the event that key individuals die or depart unexpectedly is not too difficult; persuading them to prepare people for advancement years ahead of their actual promotions presents more challenges. Therefore, replacement planning is a start but only a start. and performance. A course of action for identifying talent throughout the organization, it involves the selection of talented employees to replace key managers who will leave the
True succession planning requires a balanced evaluation of talent, potential, experience, company because of personal preference, retirement, reassignment, or termination. Here is my own definition of succession planning:
Succession planning is a deliberate, systematic effort to guarantee leadership continuity, a process for ensuring a suitable supply of candidates for current and future key jobs so that the careers of individuals can be managed to optimize both the organization's needs and the individual's aspirations.
A powerful way to maximize human capital both now and in the future, succession planning creates an ongoing, continuous plan to focus attention on talent. It establishes a way to meet the organization's needs for top performance over a long period of time, starting with the sometimes daunting plan to advance someone to the number one position, the Chief Executive Officer.
How do you really know if your current processes sufficiently address your succession planning issues? Ask yourself the following:
• Do managers complain that no one is ready when vacancies open up?
• Are expenses for external searches increasing?
• Will you compromise your strategy because you don't have the talent to support it?
• Are possible successors for key positions leaving because they perceive no room for advancement?
A "yes" answer to any one of these questions implies that your company has not adequately established or communicated its plans for the future of its people, both for replacing people in key roles and for developing high potentials for advancement.
How do You Get Started?
When is the right time to start succession planning? Now! If you start five or even ten years before the estimated departure of key leaders, it may be too late. Unforeseen circumstances can interfere with your best-laid plans, and the company will be faced, not with the quiet crisis of succession, but with a screaming one. Whatever your current situation, these steps describe how you can start a strategic succession plan:
1. Clarify expectations. What does the current CEO expect from each level of the organization? No initiative has a hope of succeeding if the CEO doesn't support it and require commitment to it.
2. Review the current succession plan for the organization. Audit its architecture to reveal vulnerabilities. Determine if this leadership pipeline supports your mission, vision, and values of the organization. Analyze the one, three, and five-year strategies, and evaluate these strategic objectives vis-à-vis the current pool of talent.
3. Based on this information, forecast future talent needs. Examine current versus required performance, existing enhancement initiatives, projected turnover, anticipated retirements, talent growth projection, demographics, and changing business trends.
4. Working together, the members of the leadership team establish competencies for each key position.
5. Identify excellence markers and critical success factors for each position on the leadership team. Ask yourselves "what are the skills, experience, knowledge, and personality characteristics required for exemplary performance?" Competency models can be created for each job or each level in the organization, but there should be some commonality at the upper echelons of the company. In general, you will want to address decision-making and problem solving, results orientation, leadership abilities, and people skills. For as many roles as possible, identify different levels of achievement and the criteria for moving from one level of achievement to the next. Start with your most important roles and scrutinize your top performers. Build a talent profile that encapsulates the best practices of these achievers. Any leadership pipeline demands a continuous flow of talent, so extend succession planning throughout the various levels of the organization. In other words, establish a systematic method for moving from the bottom to the top.
6. Next, as a team, agree on standards for high-potentials. Some organizations concentrate on the top 5% of their population. The criteria for determining a high-potential would include the following:
• The ability to advance two job levels in five years
• A willingness to relocate or acquire requisite field experience
• The potential for at least 10-15 years with the organization
7. Identify the strengths and weaknesses for each individual you are considering for key positions. Assess "ready now" people, identify a timeline for "ready now" in the future, and examine each high-potential vis-à-vis this list.
8. Ask each member of the leadership team to identify high-potentials currently in the organization and one or two possible successors for each key position in the pipeline. For immediate decisions compare this list of high potential candidates with the list of "ready now" candidates, or look at the timeline for projected readiness to determine when they will be able to take on new responsibilities.
9. Finally, assign members of the leadership team accountability for development plans for each high-potential.
Leadership Intelligence
Even though there are other predictors of future leadership success, the most crucial forecaster of success at the top of the organization is brainpower. Three main components define what I call leadership intelligence: critical thinking, learning ability, and quantitative abilities
Dispassionate scrutiny, strategic focus, and analytical reasoning form the foundation of critical thinking. These abilities equip a person to anticipate consequences, to get to the core of complicated issues, and to zero in on the critical few, while putting aside the trivial many. Often successful construction supervisors and project managers possess excellent tactical thinking abilities, or a step-by-step approach to decisions. However, this kind of thinking tends to limit people as they ascend the ladder. Often the complexity of managing multiple projects separates the tactical from the strategic thinker. I have worked with several construction companies that made the mistake of promoting a person to a position that demanded strategic thinking, when the person's true talent lay in a tactical approach.
General learning ability is the second most important aspect of leadership intelligence. When leaders can acquire new information quickly, they do not lose valuable time. Often, but not always, educational success is an accurate predictor of how quickly someone will learn in the organization.
Quantitative abilities are critical at the top of most organizations. These skills allow a person to evaluate the nuances of mergers, acquisitions, and risk-taking ventures. Estimators and risk managers often demonstrate well-developed quantitative abilities, but when it comes to promotions, decision makers too often overlook these gifted contributors in favor of those who have more operational experience:::::

In today's business world, leaders need to get ideas, opinions, and perspectives from diverse sources. In particular, there are times when we need to tune in to people and sources of information that contradict our prevailing view of the world.
Unfortunately, many of the online sources we turn to for information are surreptitiously moving us in the opposite direction.
According to political activist and former executive director of moveon.org, Eli Pariser, Internet giants like Google, Yahoo and Facebook have begun using algorithms to determine what we see and hear online. He discovered this when he realized that Facebook had removed all the links to conservative people from his Facebook page - without his permission or knowledge.
Is some evil conspiracy afoot?
Probably not. What these companies want to do is maximize advertising revenue while making it easier for all of us to access the content we want. Only now they have taken it upon themselves to decide what we want to see, and that's not a good thing.
As Pariser explains it, when Google uses complicated algorithms to determine the results of online searches, it creates a "filter bubble" that screens out everything the search engine thinks we don't want to see. Or at least buries it so deep in the search results that we don't bother clicking on it.
Put together all the algorithms (which deliver information to your Internet doorstep based on what you click on most often) from all the prominent online information sources and you end up with your own unique online universe of information. The information that populates your universe depends on your filter bubble, which, in turn, depends on who you are and what you do online.
The problem is that we don't get to decide what gets through our filter. Yahoo, Google, and Facebook are now doing that for us. More important, we don't see what gets edited out, so we don't even know what we're missing. This moves us all to a world where the Internet shows us what it thinks we want to see, and not necessarily what we need to see.
The solution, suggests Pariser, does not require eliminating the filters. After all, we need some tools for sorting through everything on the Internet. The answer is for Google, Yahoo, and others to give us a healthy degree of control over the filters, so that we determine what gets screened in and what gets screened out.
Why do we need many diverse sources of information?
From a practical standpoint, it just might keep us from going out of business. These days the new product or service that turns our industry upside down often comes from way out in left field. We need to continually scan the world beyond the walls of our business to detect these kinds of threats.
At a deeper level, it has to do with the way our brain works.
The human brain is an amazing organ, especially the newer areas with their higher-level reasoning abilities. Yet we're still stuck with the "old" brain that helped us survive back when we had to quickly recognize and respond to predators and other threats.
The old brain is a superb pattern-recognizer. Consequently, it tends to look for information that supports what we already know to be true about the world. In doing so, it actively rejects information that contradicts our view of the world. So we get caught in a double-whammy of seeing things the same old way while actively avoiding new information that doesn't align with what we already believe to be true.
That's how we can get caught totally off guard when our best customer defects to a competitor. And that's how we never see the outsider who sweeps into our market and steals our market share with a new product or service we never even imagined.
These old brain tendencies wouldn't pose such a problem if the world didn't move so quickly. But it does, and we need to move just as quickly in order to keep up with it. Consider the following:
Facebook, the leading social networking service, has yet to reach its 8th birthday. As of July 2011, it had more than 750 million active users.
YouTube, founded in 2005, now uploads 24 hours of video every minute of every day. Its company blog claims that the site receives more than three billion views per day.
The baby of the group, Twitter started out as an R&D experiment in 2006. A recent count had them at 200 million users and 1.6 billion search queries per day. I suspect the number of users has grown significantly since the last count.
Ten years ago, who could have conceived that we would be able to post promotional videos of ourselves, at no cost (other than to produce the video) for the whole world to see? And five years ago, nobody in their right mind would have dreamed that we would be communicating our products and services through short, concise "tweets" with a maximum 140 character count. At that point, we were still trying to figure out how to build effective web sites!
That's how quickly our world changes. And that's why we can't afford to let anyone else decide for us what we see, hear and read on the Internet.If we don't stay current with emerging ideas, trends and technologies - especially those that contradict our prevailing view of the world -- we put our businesses at risk.
As business leaders, we need to make a habit of exposing ourselves to divergent points of view. We need to set up systems and processes that expose our employees to new and different ways of thinking. And we especially need to make sure that we don't let others dictate or control our sources of information. To do so limits our ability to make informed decisions and puts us at risk of letting others control our destinies rather than making our own.
Google, Yahoo, Facebook - are you listening?