Succession Planning & Building a Sustaining Legacy

When MacKenzie was four, we celebrated my birthday with her Godfather and my dear friend, Thomas Bowen, Thomas’ partner, and my parents. We were at Thomas’ home in Maryland, and I was staying the following week in that region for work. My parents were taking MacKenzie as I traveled. As the evening wrapped and my parents and MacKenzie were about to leave, we all hugged, and she ran into my mom’s arms as her grandmother put her in her car seat. They all smiled and waved as they drove away. Thomas looked at me and said, “That must sting.” I looked at him confused and asked, “What must?” He said, “She wasn’t sad to leave you.” I laughed and said, “Absolutely not. It’s joyful. It takes a village to raise an epic human, and her deep social connections to people other than her father and me will help her build a network that will sustain her all her life. I’m grateful.” The way we say goodbye matters.

The same is true for our career journeys. As leaders, our long-term legacy elevates when we better understand when our gift has been given and support the leadership transition. Longevity brings tremendous value, and in a rapidly changing world, leaders must build self-awareness, hold humility close, and trust a network of honest advisors to ensure transitions occur with gravitas, celebration, and timeliness.

Much has been said about beginnings. Especially for the President & CEO role, there are voluminous insights about the initial period of service to an organization. One of my favorites that Mark Meyer, President & CEO of Filene Research Institute, shared is “The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter,” by Michael D. Watkins. I found it to be a powerful guide to integrating into an organization as a new leader.

When it comes to closing career chapters, as an industry, we have become stronger at building succession plans and growing a bench for talent and a plan to develop talent throughout the organization, for the Board, the President & CEO, the Executive Team, and well beyond. These plans typically focus on team development, gap analyses of organizational needs, and immediate and near-term transition scenarios. We also have a vibrant industry of talented recruitment firms that support the search and hiring of executive talent and, increasingly, Board members.

It is far less common for organizations to have crafted detailed and long-term plans for transitions. I invite us to consider succession planning as “succession and transition planning.” As our industry experiences shifts in the many long-tenured President & CEO positions, these transitions and the investment in them matter. How might we create a journey for the exiting leader to be celebrated, honored, and elevated while inviting an equally endearing and connected path for the incoming leader? What does creating an organization that says “goodbye” well mean? How might organizational cultures be nurtured more carefully and experience less tumult if the organization spent as much time on the transition plan as they do on the recruitment?

Here are seven considerations to support an even stronger succession & transition plan:

1. 1.Build a culture that knows how to and models saying goodbye. Saying goodbye gracefully includes recognizing when it is time to leave and operationalizing measures of impact by role and signals of when it may be time to move on – celebrating those who leave matters. Even more importantly, the culture must build bridges between past and future talent and demonstrate their interconnectedness and dependence. At Community Financial Credit Union, we talked about it as “springboarding from a remarkable history into an exceptional future.”
2. 2.Learn to Love Offboarding. Most of our People Teams have spent decades growing and enhancing onboarding. Offboarding practices carry just as much value. Consider how you celebrate those who leave and promote their transition both internally and externally. Welcome open conversations about potential career moves that may even be to other organizations, including supporting interview preparation. Create expectations for leaders about how they remain supportive of those transitioning to new roles, whether internally or externally, so that people see action behind the theory of support.
3. 3.Grow the Alum Effect. One of my favorite research reports from Filene Research Institute and Sekou Bermiss, Ph.D.is titled “Winning by Losing: A Case Study of Alumni Effects on Credit Union Recruitment.” While many of us have found the shifting landscape toward vastly shorter tenures of team members challenging, there are benefits of attrition that Dr. Bermiss outlines, including, if done well, ultimately becoming an even more attractive employer. For example, when your organization’s alum moves on to other organizations with impressive new roles and growing careers, your organization gains a reputation for supporting career growth.
4. 4.Honor the Suck. Leaving a role that may have defined portions of your life can be agonizing and a loss. Just as when we lose a loved one, a transition from a role can feel devastating. Transparency about that pain should be honored, and resources should be created to support those who make a change. Consider inviting them to be part of your alum network and to build and share learning for your team.
5. 5.Share Success Stories and Set Expectations. Elevate those who handle their transition from the organization or a role well and discuss what made the change work well. Provide clarity in expectations about how goodbyes should be one of the organization’s core competencies and build accountability for such behavior to be carried forward.
6. 6.Create Alum Opportunities. Consider an alum network that might provide support, mentorship, and ideas for current team members. In a rapidly changing world, having additional resources for team members to learn, grow, and adapt could add low-cost, high-potential additions to human capital development. Imagine if we, as an industry, created such a resource across our movement that could help deepen our learning capabilities and make our industry more desirable for even more talented humans over time.
7. 7.Challenge Team Members to Engage. As we build this competency within our credit unions, inviting team members to raise these conversations with their leaders is also essential. Consider how hard discussing a desire to grow, especially outside the organization, might be the first time and build suggestions for when to have such a conversation, how to begin the conversation, and what framing might make the conversation more successful. Check in with team members to gauge leader responses and continue coaching.

I challenge us as an industry to set an example that other industries and organizations can learn from. We have a tremendous amount to gain by celebrating those who cleared the path for growth and built our industry. The business outcomes of making change cycles of leadership transitions smoother, growing and attracting top talent, and sharpening and deepening our learning resources could be exponential and could play a role in ensuring our industry becomes a highly desirable place for the next generation of talent. MacKenzie’s life has been more vibrant because she’s been surrounded by more humans. Our organizations will be more vibrant as we engage and activate our alums. If this interests you, let’s collaborate to shape our shared future.