Best Practices

By Bruce Maller

Bruce Maller is president and CEO of BSM Consulting, an internationally recognized health care consulting firm headquartered in Incline Village, Nev., and Scottsdale, Ariz. For more information about the author, BSM Consulting, or content/resources discussed in this article are available at the BSM Café at www.BSMCafe.com.

Succession planning: My real-world case study

Focus on developing the leaders of tomorrow.

I've written about succession planning before, but an additional nudge to get a point across is always helpful, and since we've recently implemented this strategic initiative at BSM Consulting, I would like to share with you what we learned from this experience. Perhaps this will give you some ideas you can use.

I have to start out by being honest. When I first brought this topic up at BSM planning meetings several years ago, my team got a bit nervous, fearing that I had one foot out the door and was planning to drift into the sunset of my career. As they discovered, the reality of the situation is quite the contrary.

The message I delivered then and continue to reinforce today is that succession planning is not an event but rather a process of creating an organization with continued focus on developing and nurturing the leaders of tomorrow. As the process has evolved over the past few years, we have discovered and unleashed tremendous potential in many of our team members. Here are the steps we took.

1. We made succession planning a strategic imperative. As the word “imperative” implies, this was something we felt was a “must have” to insure our company's long-term success.

2. We educated our team to minimize any potential concerns. This is challenging when you have more than 40 employees.

3. Our senior leadership team developed a plan of action.

4. The action plan started with an assessment of our talent. This focused on those who we were convinced planned to be with us for the duration and possessed requisite intellectual “bandwidth,” emotional maturity and leadership potential.

5. We are investing in employee development. In some cases, we are supporting employees who want to obtain an advanced degree (i.e., an MBA).

6. We are tweaking our organizational structure. The goal is to ensure that it aligns with our future goals and employee career development plans.

7. We update the team regularly. This keeps them aware of the progress we're making toward our long-term succession goals. We weave this into our annual strategic planning meetings.

WHAT'S IN IT FOR YOU?

You might be inclined to read this and say “I still don't get what's in it for me or my practice.” Here are a few tangible and intangible benefits we have discovered along the way:

• Team members feel a greater level of engagement and commitment to the company.
• This feeling translates into greater teamwork, improved productivity and efficiency.
• Although we have never had that much “drama” in our company, the process has helped us make continual progress in eliminating divisive and unproductive nuances that are common in most work forces.
• We are in fact discovering our leaders of tomorrow (both on our consulting and operational teams).
• Coming to work is more fun since the burden of managing the company is truly shared by all.
  Try it, you might like it! OM