What the Royal Family can teach businesses about succession planning - Emma Robinson

The passing of our beloved Queen Elizabeth II triggered a meticulous sequence of events to ensure continuity for our nation. It’s a succession plan that’s been 70 years in the making, from the day she ascended the throne.

Of course, most organisations don’t need seven decades of planning to replace key people within their business, but a thorough succession plan is vital for any company that wants to protect its future.

People who hold key positions in a business will leave, be fired, retire, or, sadly, die.

A successful succession plan identifies critical people in a business and develops a plan to replace them if they were to leave. These plans are often an insurance policy that never needs to be used.

In my career, I have put together succession plans that have never seen the light of day, but that have provided shareholders with peace of mind. I have also helped organisations put that succession plan into place, across various scenarios.

I have worked with founder-owned businesses that required a replacement CEO for the retiring owner; private-equity owned corporations who wanted to oust the financial director; owners who didn’t want their children to be their successors; and niche industry- focused organisations who feared their technical director may leave and take their knowledge with them.

The goal with succession planning, is to create a pipeline of potential successors for these positions, for both the short and the long term.

The first step is to consider the critical roles that are intertwined with business success. Look at key people across the business and answer, “If this person left, how would that affect us?”.

Once you have pinpointed the potential impact of specific people leaving, you can then list key skills that each role requires, and the level of experience each candidate requires.

This then leaves you with a template to identify suitable replacements. These may be hired internally or externally.

Ask yourself, if you were to hire for the role internally, who has the skills and knowledge to do so? It may not necessarily be the person immediately next in line in the organisational chart; it may be someone more junior.

With this template, you can determine whether you have someone in-house that can step into the role right now, 6-12 months on, or in a year or more.

Train these potential successors with mentors and job rotations; create individual development plans and have trial runs, where a potential successor assumes some of the responsibilities of the role they are inheriting. This practice will allow the successor to gain potentially valuable experience.

For some roles, you may need to hire externally, especially those in the C-Suite. You often have two options: recruit from a competitor or hire someone from another industry. There are industries with very similar skill sets and standards, so outside the box thinking is important.

In this situation, you should be recruiting for tomorrow, not today. Look for people who are not actively looking for roles, and who’ve already done what you’re trying to achieve.

This type of thinking is what will help you attract candidates who are motivated by their next career challenge. After all, you will want people who will make the role their own, much like King Charles will undoubtedly do.

The Queen not only inspired us in life, but in death too. Irreplaceable people may leave us, but they leave a lasting legacy that forms the core of our organisations.

Emma Robinson is a headhunter and founder of Red Diamond Executive