Succession Planning and Management: Centre for Creative Leadership (CCL) and Succession Process

Succession Planning and Management
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Abstract
Succession in an organization is meant to ready the successors of key positions within the organization. Turnover of employees always affects the organization's performance negatively the sole purpose of succession planning is to alleviate these problems. Succession planning has gathered public interest over the past few years this was mostly spurred by the demographic projection that older worker will increase by 2010.
Centre for Creative Leadership (CCL) first published on the topic of succession planning in 1995. CCL takes a broader perspective and brings into context development, CEO succession, succession systems and architecture and high potentials.
This bibliography critically looks at the four areas above. The article looks at them from a critical perspective rather than a comprehensive perspective. The main objective of this evaluation is to aid analysts in conceptualizing, planning and effective implementation of succession planning in their respective organizations.
Succession Planning and Development
The Succession Process
When the succession process is put into consideration along a continuum, the chain would involve replacement planning, succession planning, and succession management. Replacement planning involves focusing on the identification of successors that are most likely to be chosen at the top level organization. This strategy would work at the lower levels but is majorly based on the assumption of the current manager and act as a model for future managers. This is not necessarily a wise assumption because the business environment is very volatile.
Succession management, on the other hand, aims at developing individuals with high potential and make them ready for a vacancy on key positions should they arise. This gives the organization a wide selection of candidates that will be up for assessment when a position is deserted. This creates a leadership pipeline for all managerial levels. Organizations will sometimes include contributor positions in the succession management plan and give more attention to mid-senior management level.
Recruitment, selection, and retention strategies when added to succession management look exactly like management of talent. Talent development would involve the same processes: development, recruitment, staffing, retention and evaluation of existing talent. In real world analytics, the difference between succession management and talent management is almost indistinguishable.
Succession management provides a robust way of selecting qualified candidates. One of the major advantages of succession management is that it builds capability at several management levels. However, the process requires extensive use of resources and orientation that seeks to understand the integration of its usage into daily operations of the organization.
Succession planning has the same element as succession management but puts more emphasis on furnishing the top management levels of organizations. The succession planning approach is more static compared to the more dynamic succession management.
Literature Review
CEO Succession
Cannella, Albert A. Jr. and Shen, Wei, Revisiting the Performance Consequences of CEO Succession: The Impacts of Successor Type, Post Succession Senior Executive Turnover, and Departing CEO Tenure, Academy of Management Journal, Volume 45, Number 4, August 2002, Pp. 717-734
Cannella et al. (2002) suggest that while employers from outside the organization tend to improve the policies of the company it is unfair to say that all new interior employees will rekindle their predecessors’ strategies and policies. This is derived from the common belief that outsiders bring change to an organization and thereby improved performance.
This study takes a look at the impact of having insiders or outsiders replacing outgoing employees. Additionally the study looks at the executive turnover on the performance of a company and the type of turnover versus the type of CEO successor.
The authors come to the conclusion that neither the contenders nor the outsiders have a positive impact on the firms’ performance. Authors suggest that the social network constraints created by contenders while in the firm constraints them against strategic change. Unless the constraint employees restructure their previous regime, it follows that they will not be successful. The same occurs for outsiders as a high-level post turnover at the top, and senior managerial positions have a negative impact on the company’s performance.
The authors hence suggest that to understand better the consequences of performance in succession, researchers should not put their entire focus on the CEO’s successor. Post-succession executive turnover has a positive effect on the contender successions and a negative impact on a firm's returns on investment.
Conger, Jay A. & Nadler, David A.; When CEOs Step Up to Fail, MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2004, Pp 50-56
The Conger et al. article of 2002 summarizes the three main reasons why new CEO’s fail early in the tenures: - The actions of the outgoing CEO, A corrupted succession process and the orientation of the CEO. For the first reason, the outgoing CEO may be unwilling to leave the job, two maybe resistant to address new problems or may be three; pushing for termination of their contracts due to personal reason and not for the benefit of the organization. For reason number, two organizations can avoid it by creating sound development plans for their potential employees. The authors enumerate on the dangers of choosing a personality whose does not fit the CEO role. The authors of this article exhibited that the succession process should begin when a new CEO is installed. The rationale behind this is that the progress of the candidates can be assessed, and emerging talent spotted easily.
Concerning the third r...