Prioritizing Leadership Succession And What to Do if You Haven’t – Leadership Insights from Liddell Consulting

You have a key management or executive team position to fill. You aren’t sure whether to promote from within or hire an outsider. What do you do?

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a simple cut and dry answer. But the solution is unique to your company, your leadership team, your industry, your business strategy… There is no replacement for a succession plan, but if you are in this position today, here are a few questions to ask yourself to help you make the decision.

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What are your goals? Some leaders are primarily focused on the continuity of service and value they provide to the customer. In other cases, replacing key management roles is an opportunity to bring a fresh approach to the business. Prioritizing your hiring goals to support your strategic objectives can lend perspective to what hiring approach to take.

How prominent is trust in your company culture? Trust is fundamental to a strong company culture and is key to perpetuating viable growth channels for your business. A leader brought in from outside of the company can create a welcome culture shift. Promoting from within, however, can encourage greater performance by recognizing effort. Ultimately if you have a high level of mutual trust baked into your culture, your teams will trust your decision.

What might be clouding the decision? Leaders who understand their own biases are better able to make wise hiring decisions. Family run businesses, for example, might be easily impacted by favoritism or misplaced loyalty. Pressure from a board of directors or limited exposure to your bench can also cloud your decision making process. Be thorough in investigating internal succession opportunities, but remain flexible to an external opportunities. This self-knowledge will benefit your business in the long-run.

There are benefits and risks to both hiring from outside and promoting from within. Thoughtful, thorough, and strategic succession planning greatly decreases the chances that game-time, or reactive, decision making will lead to an ill fitting hire – regardless of where the candidate came from. What it comes down to is consistent attention to building a team that encourages leadership growth at all levels to feed your leadership pipeline. Thinking ahead about what skills leadership roles require and how they are evolving will allow room for a more advantageous next move for your company.

“A man who does not think and plan long ahead will find trouble right at his door.”

-Confucius

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