Succession planning and leadership development

Leadership development and succession planning: How do you stack up?

Succession planning and leadership development are critical for building a resilient, sustainable business. We all understand that we live in an age of rapid technological, social and economic change. Add geopolitical turmoil and its geo-strategic impacts, and you have a recipe for uncertainty and rapid change – perhaps even chaos.

What can organisations do to ensure they’re in the best possible position to meet emerging challenges and unexpected events in a complex, ever-evolving business and political environment?

Leadership: Solving today’s problems

The immediate challenge is having capable, competent and adaptable leaders at the helm. Boards must have the right mix of skills, experience and differing perspectives to provide the broadest problem-solving toolkit.

Good Governance Improvement notes that ‘high-performing boards ... actively contribute to organisational success through productive leadership, forward-looking strategies, and a commitment to good governance’.

We couldn’t agree more, and skills matrices and leadership development play critical roles in achieving high performance. They enable boards to up-skill their existing members and even begin grooming potential future leaders.

This goes beyond updating board members’ knowledge about new technologies, social trends and political developments. It also means ensuring they are mentally flexible and can take in new information and ideas without discarding tried-and-tested approaches and frameworks. 

Succession: Developing tomorrow’s leaders

It’s prudent to take a long-term view of your operations. Even if your business is performing well now, with an agile and alert board, strong leadership at all levels and sound financial underpinnings, it could still run aground if it loses too many key personnel too quickly.

That’s why succession planning is perhaps every board’s most important responsibility. Ensuring a strong talent pipeline, with a broad array of candidates and potential candidates, is more than an ‘insurance policy’, it’s a ‘launching pad’ for your business’s future growth and prosperity.

Look to have a broad array of talent and consider adding members from fields not directly associated with your industry. Fresh perspectives from members with different backgrounds and life experiences can provide valuable new insights; as the Harvard Business School noted in 2024, ‘As companies wrestle with fast-changing, ambiguous business conditions across so many industries, board diversity improves leaders’ ability to make decisions in the face of increased complexity’.

Brexit: Complicating our decisions

Brexit has complicated UK business operations. The Institute for Government noted that ‘The UK has yet to draw a line under Brexit … the immediate economic consequences continue to reverberate.’

Those reverberations have affected different sectors in different ways, as UKICE notes. Undoubtedly, some sectors, such as agriculture and manufacturing, face challenges, while others, such as services and information technology, have found opportunities.

Boards must be adaptable. Brexit has only highlighted good governance’s critical importance to business success and sustainability, especially around strategic planning and investment decisions. Leadership development and succession planning to create and embed a forward-looking mindset have never been more critical. 

OnBoard: Assisting your evolution

Tracking and managing your board’s evolution is challenging, but fortunately, various software platforms can assist you.

Competent board software packages offer features, such as secure messaging and information repositories, online voting, minuting, skills matrices and succession planning.

Naturally, we believe OnBoard is the best solution. It includes state-of-the-art board life cycle management tools, including leadership development and succession planning. It also handles meeting operations, board decisions and actions, communication and engagement, and security and compliance.

If you’d like to learn more, download our free brochure or, better yet, request a free demo today. Our team would be delighted to show you what we can achieve.

www.onboardmeetings.com