Nonprofit organizational succession planning consultation facilitated
by leading Transitions will usually include one or more of the
following three primary phases:
Phase I – Assessment and Culture
Creation, Phase II – Executive Level Emergency
Succession Planning, and Phase III – Ongoing Succession Planning / Leadership
Development. In order for me to make some concrete and sustainable
recommendations, we offer the following steps within each of the
three phases:
In this first phase of our consultation we will establish a baseline for
succession planning practices that are already in place at your organization.
From there, we will work with you and your staff on the importance of everyone
in the organization talking about changes in leadership, even when these
changes are not imminent. We will be working with you to determine what
practices are already in place that fall under the succession planning umbrella.
Oftentimes, we conduct structured interviews with various key constituents.
We will work with you on how you may bring succession planning issues into
the conversations with your Board of Directors.
If you wish, we enjoy talking with your Board President and / or members
of your governance committee of the Board of Directors about their own (volunteer)
succession planning responsibilities and opportunities. The intention is
for volunteers and paid staff to see how this work is about securing your
organization's mission into the future.
Emergency succession planning is a best practice for every organization,
since it strives to ensure ongoing programming and operations in the event
of an unplanned and extended executive absence. When emergency circumstances
occur, there is an enormous level of stress experienced by an organization's
staff, board, funders, volunteers and, ultimately, by service recipients.
Our preference is to work with a team of staff that you select to identify
key leadership functions carried out by the executive director, identify
senior organizational leaders best qualified to assume the role of executive
director in an emergency situation, and recommend the cross-training necessary
so the team can fulfill the leadership functions until an (interim) executive
director is appointed.
In addition to being better prepared, a major and immediate benefit of
this work is staff can enhance leadership skills and perhaps improve their
knowledge of each other's roles and responsibilities. They will also
gain confidence in their own ability to assume executive functions once
cross-training begins.
We will outline policies and procedures for the temporary appointment
of an acting executive director.
Working with your organizational leaders to create succession planning
practices that can be sustainable into the future.
Together, we will look at the up-and-coming pipeline of leadership within
your organization to determine if these young and/or newer professionals
are receiving what they need to be successful in their work.
When applicable, we can work with your fund development staff on the essential
task of including all of your past, current and future succession planning
efforts into proposal procurement and composition.
This phase is the time to address what needs to be done to implement
new ideas and ensure that there are mechanisms in place to facilitate these
ideas being maintained on into the future.
As members of the board of directors, there is much you can do to prepare
the organization for an eventual transition long before the executive director
announces an intention to leave.
. Management
development builds leadership potential broadly across the organization. Succession
planning involves finding and perhaps preparing someone with leadership
ability to assume the executive director's functions. An effective
leadership transition is a product of effective management development.
Sometimes, when an organization has been committed to management development
over time the successor to an outgoing executive director can be
found among current or past staff members.
The board should insist that all senior staff members have personal development
plans, created jointly with their supervisors, which chart their
desired areas for professional growth. Each staff member's plan
would likely include some job-specific sills, such as marketing, board relations,
strategic visioning, PR, or database creation, as well so-called
"soft skills," such as communicating effectively, managing conflict, and
setting priorities.
Then the board and executive director should ensure that all staff have
opportunities through nonprofit capacity building training, cross training
in one another's responsibilities, short internships, mentorships, coaching,
and on the job experience to strengthen their leadership capacity. Funding
for training and other growth opportunities should be included in the organization's
budget and grant requests, and supervisors should track progress and provide
encouragement and coaching where necessary.
2. Make sure that the executive director
and the board have accurate up-to-date job descriptions that
relate to what you each really do and are based on an assessment of what
the organization needs. This is helpful not just for tracking how
things are going in your current executive director, but also will establish
a framework for creating a job description for his or her eventual successor.
3. Consciously plan for transfer of "institutional knowledge".
Insist that processes and procedures be well documented, information
be shared, files be centralized and standardized, and whatever other
steps are necessary be taken to ensure that critical knowledge
isn't just in one or two people's heads and can easily be accessed
by others as needed.
4. Test yourself. The next time the executive director
takes a vacation, put the system to the test and evaluate the results. What
information was hard to come by? What decisions were difficult to
make? What systems need to be put into place to ensure a smooth transition
for the organization and the new leadership?
5. Create and sustain a culture of evaluation. Even
in those organizations where regular feedback and evaluation of
programs and services are the norm, it is not always the case that
the board routinely reviews the executive director's performance.
But doing so is a critical board function. Since the board and the
executive director ideally work together very closely, it is important that
the board have feedback about its performance from the executive
director as well. Be sure to have frequent conversations about mutual expectations.
Develop annual professional goals for the executive director and for board
members that advance the organization's overall institutional goals. Some
goals would be common to all board members and some would be specific to
the positions certain members hold and the responsibilities they take on. Such
goals create a frame work for the conversations about how things are going
and can sometimes begin a discussion about an executive's future transition.
Schedule an annual formal self-assessment and reciprocal evaluation of
the board and the executive director. First the board and the executive
director should consider how their own performance measured up to their
own expectations for themselves and then they should explore one another's
contributions. By means of this constructive process board members
and the executive director will come to understand what changes they might
make that would benefit the organization.
While this may sound great in theory, most board members and executive
directors are reluctant to give one another honest feedback. Yet without
it, board members and executive directors are likely to become dissatisfied
with each other, coming to see one another as impediments rather than partners.
see Emergency Plan [pdf] from CompassPoint
for more information
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