Alignment to Succession Planning - Is Your Business Functioning With A Strong Core?
You’ve often heard me talk about the relevance and necessity of succession planning. Quite simply, for your business to thrive, your company needs to have a blueprint in place that maps out leadership transitions.
Please review:
I’m frequently called upon to prescribe what’s needed for effective succession planning. In a word, it’s ALIGNMENT. You have to have alignment in several areas to achieve effective succession planning.
Self-Alignment
Business alignment
“Physical” Alignment
Self-Alignment
I open so many presentations and speeches by asking two simple questions:
What Do You Want?
Why Do You Want It?
These two fundamental issues drive leaders to create specific legacies for themselves and their companies.
Personal alignment to succession planning involves addressing critical issues for leaders when passing the torch to a new generation. If you’re looking to navigate your business through a change in leadership, ask yourself …
What do you want for yourself?
Where are you, personally?
What are you excited about?
What do you want to do in the next phase of your life?
Are you looking to …
…travel more?
…cash out?
… retire?
…become a CEO Emeritus?
Dealing with these highly personal issues will ultimately ease the company’s leadership evolution and prepare you for the next phase in life.
Business Alignment
Similar to resolving personal alignment considerations, it’s important to take a hard look at
where your business is at.
Are you looking …
…to sell, merge your company, step down?
…to promote management from within the company?
…to bring someone in from the outside?
Is the company ready for a sale?
- What plans are in place to prepare the company for sale?
- Are your financials prepared for potential buyer review?
- Is your management team prepared for the transition, and will they participate in the sale?
- Are you working with a business broker or another entity to identify potential buyers in the marketplace?
“Physical” Alignment
Business alignment always makes sense to me when I reflect on my experience with dance. Your head has to be sitting literally on top of your shoulders, on top of your ribs, on top of your hips, and on top of your balanced feet. With a strong core that holds it all together.
When observing dancers leap, spin, or be lifted, the power comes from their core. They're not entirely supporting your weight because your core is also doing some of the work. When spinning or leaping, you are always using your core, all the while focusing on where you're going, and maintaining balance as you spin on your own axis.
Why am I sharing these dance principles and what does it have to do with alignment in your business? Use these parallels:
Is Your Business Functioning With a Strong Core?
Your strength, your inner power, your people (from team to clients.)
Are you focused on where you want to take the company next?
Strategic growth, merger, acquisition?
I consider both my intuition and business sense when making these decisions for myself and when guiding my clients through theirs.
Remember the Four Pillars I talk about that keep a business running and give you the ability to scale. Always check them when looking at the leader’s succession plan.
1. Financial strategy,
2. Team strategy,
3. Marketing,
4. Sales.
Their influence will be meaningful for the next generation of company leaders.
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