Succession Planning from the Middle Up!

Leadership development is one of the biggest challenges faced by organizations today as talent retires with few qualified replacements on the horizon. Now is the time to make sure that your organization is grooming your Middle Managers to move up so they can hit the ground running! As your organization plans for the future, coaching can be an important tool for personnel retention, employee satisfaction, and succession planning. In Succession Planning from the Middle Up!, Dr TC discusses a coaching series she specifically designed for middle managers that was used in a doctoral research study as a performance improvement intervention. At the end of the coaching series, observer surveys indicated that the Middle Managers improved 17 to 60% in their use of leadership competencies. Now Dr TC is taking the coaching series from that study and applying it to the succession planning process.

Succession plans have some basic similarities across most organizations:

1. Target leadership positions for planning
2. Begin planning early and continue
3. Define required qualities of leadership
4. Build your team's bench strength
5. Your Middle Managers ARE your team

After participating in the coaching series outlined in this seminar, Dr TC suggests that revisiting your succession plans might yield the following corollary points:

1. Discover Middle Manager positions in line with target positions
2. Succession planning from the middle up -- it's ongoing!
3. Leadership competencies as benchmarks
4. Gain bench strength through temperament, competencies, coaching, and results
5. Your Middle Managers ARE your team of tomorrow!

In Succession Planning from the Middle Up!, you’ll have the opportunity to:

• Explore your temperament with the Keirsey Discovery System
• Hear the story of the coaching series and the Middle Managers who took part in it
• Discover how the coaching series combined temperament, leadership competencies, and coaching
• Interface with the steps of succession planning and how this coaching series fits in that process
• Brainstorm ways you can apply this coaching series to your organization’s succession planning process for middle managers

The leadership competencies used in the coaching series were based on the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award senior leadership performance excellence criteria. If your organization already has its own leadership competencies, Dr TC can use those competencies instead during the coaching series. The nine competencies derived from the Baldrige senior leadership criteria are:

1. Foster the organization’s vision and values, mission and objectives
2. Exemplify legal and ethical behavior
3. Create an environment for performance improvement
4. Encourage innovation and learning
5. Model and nurture self-development of appropriate leadership skills
6. Establish clear two-way communication channels for expectation and feedback
7. Empower direct reports as much as possible
8. Reward and recognize high performance
9. Reinforce performance that adds value for internal and external customers

I’ll be posting each of the competencies in the coming weeks so you'll have the opportunity to share your best practices surrounding each competency. If you or your organization are interested in participating in a similar coaching series, or in hosting the seminar, contact Dr TC on her website at www.cziganconsulting.net.

In the meantime, please share some of your thoughts on the most current blog post.

Hope to see you there! Dr. TC