Succession Planning - 3 Extra-Special Benefits For Managers

By: Martin Haworth

When you lead a team in a business - any business - you need support from great people. It's a fact, you cannot do it all alone. And you will need every skill going to make the best of these key people, week in, week out.

Because this is an accountability only you can have. No-one else will be there when the lights go out. As a boss, the buck stops with you. Period.

And once you've worked your butt off to get a team that you want, what's to stop these great employees going off and getting a different job and leaving you all in a fix again? The answer is - you are.

By building an exciting, stimulating and developmental set of roles where your people are regularly challenged, they will stay. If you are supportive and encouraging for them, prepared to acknowledge often, the contribution everyone makes.

You also need people ready to take their places when fate or something else works against you. That's why succession planning is here to help you and a key tool to make more of your business, much more of the time.

Here are a three key reasons why succession planning will work for you. It's the richest skill you can develop:-

Make Time

Succession planning consistently creates skilled people, who are capable of taking the weight off a manager, to ensure that he or she doesn't have to do it all. Indeed, these talented, developed people, often can do the business even better in their particular niche skill than the boss.

This is really supportive for a manager and means that they can get back to their real task of focusing on bigger picture issues, where they give the best value.

So time is saved from the manic fire-fighting that happens when key people leave and you have to cope, somehow.

Because you know who it will be who will pick up the loose ends - however inconvenient they may be.

You got it - it's you.

With a great succession planning process in place, you can be assured that this stops - in fact there are much wider benefits too.

Confidence

With succession planning helping to create a healthy business future, managers can build a level of security into how they do their job.

This means that they can try out new things to build their business. Safe in the knowledge that they will have the right people in place, at the right time, their confidence swells and they become far 'bigger' people in themselves.

Once that confidence swells, the risks have a habit of paying off more often. Maybe it's with the confidence of knowing that not only do you have the best people in place, but they are also grooming the next generation too, that a more accurate capacity to make correct judgments kicks in.

Reward

Both financial and emotional. Enhanced performance usually generates improved earnings, since that is the way many businesses reward their people.

And there is more to it than that. It is at least just as, if not more, fulfilling to be rewarded by the emotional return, gained by using succession planning to create a brilliant team. To leave a legacy too. To leave a sustainable future.

It is personally extremely satisfying. This has positive knock-ons into other areas of a manager's wellbeing too.

It's just a simple, straightforward process, this succession planning thing is. All you need to find is the time to investigate it and the time to spend enjoying the results of your efforts.

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(c) 2007 Succession Planning Toolkit. If you want to develop and build an easy to run business, you need to develop your people well. You can find out how, right here, on Martin Haworth's fascinating website at www.SuccessionPlanningToolkit.com

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