Earlier this month, Mike Gionta delivered a great presentation at the Fordyce Forum on succession planning for your recruiting business. He stressed the importance of planning your business for the future and building it today to make succession or retirement easier down the road.
Thought Gionta’s presentation was geared toward planning for the future of your recruiting business, succession planning most certainly seems to be a topic at top of mind for many in this industry, as earlier this week Korn/Ferry International announced the launch of Korn/Ferry CEO Succession, a new global offering that provides boards and CEOs with an innovative approach to executive succession.
Korn/Ferry CEO Succession was designed through collaboration with a wide range of board clients where it assisted with the CEO succession process. It identifies and develops future CEOs within the organization in order to systematically enhance the internal leadership bench, while also keeping a close eye on external talent. The process incorporates Korn/Ferry’s validated proprietary technology and provides strategies to overcome the most common barriers to effective succession planning.
“Korn/Ferry CEO Succession helps boards with their most important task: driving performance and growth by ensuring that the right leadership is cultivated for the company’s short-, mid-, and long-term objectives,” said Jane Stevenson, vice chairman, Korn/Ferry’s Board & CEO Services Practice. “Boards need to move beyond treating succession as a single event focused on CEO replacement and instead make it a way to build generations of new leadership. They need to be thinking two to three CEOs ahead.”
Stevenson, by the way, was listed in Bloomberg Businessweek as one of the World’s Most Influential Headhunters in 2008 while she was with Heidrick & Struggles.
Some of the offerings of the Korn/Ferry CEO Succession include:
- Directly aligning future CEO criteria with short-, mid-, and long-term business strategy.
- Using externally validated, research-based assessment tools to identify high potentials and develop a deep bench of executive talent.
- Benchmarking internal and external talent against the same validated competency profiles.
- Expanding the pipeline of leadership talent available to the company through on-going mapping of the external marketplace.
- Beyond compliance, delivering succession options that maximize company value and minimize transition disruption.
Internal talent pipelining is something for all businesses to consider — not just recruiting firms. But particularly in the world of recruiting, knowing what is available within your own organization when the time comes to pass the torch is valuable. Waiting to the last minute to make such an important decision affects more people than just you, or even your team.
“Most clients are surprised to learn that they already have five to seven future CEOs inside their company. They just need to discover and develop them,” said Peter Thies, Senior Partner, Korn/Ferry Leadership and Talent Consulting and Co-Leader of Korn/Ferry’s new succession offering. “Our executive assessment and development tools help boards and CEOs more accurately predict which leaders have the greatest potential for enterprise-wide leadership roles in the future.”
Are you aware of who in your organization has the greatest potential to move up into leadership roles when the time comes? How do you assess leadership qualities amongst those within your business?