4 Reasons You Need Succession Planning ASAP

You’ve finally found the perfect candidate after a painstaking search. The Board loves them, you love them, and that pesky vacant position that has been dogging you for months is filled. It’s their first day, that’s too soon to start thinking about what happens when they leave, right?

Wrong.

For most nonprofits, vacancies eat up the budget (or don’t eat enough), lower morale, and hinder the agency’s ability to carry out its mission. But that’s not the worst thing that can happen. Some agencies have people who have been at their job so long that it’s hard to tell where the person ends and position begins. When those kind of people leave, they don’t just leave a vacancy, they can leave a crippling person-shaped hole in the organization.

To guard against this, it’s important to get everyone’s buy-in around succession planning, from the Board to HR. Here are four reasons that you can tell them to explain your new-found passion about succession planning.

1: It Encourages Employee Development

Succession planning doesn’t just involve having a plan for what the agency will do when a person moves on, it also involves selecting one or more candidates for the position and training them to be prepared to take on a new role. This can be incredibly beneficial for employee’s professional and personal development. Identifying internal candidates in succession planning can help morale and employee retention because employees will feel like they have more options for upward mobility and more chances for recognition.

2: It Relieves Stress

Not just your stress, but the employee’s stress as well! If someone knows that they can exit the organization without leaving a wake of devastation, they don’t feel such enormous pressure. It’s incredibly stressful to be the only person who knows how to do a job at an organization, so any chance to remove that by cross-training others and planning for who will take their place is wonderful. Having a succession plan in place also relieves stress because successors can be trained over a longer period of time (to help prevent burnout or overwhelm) versus having to learn and perform in a new position all at once.

3: It Builds Resiliency

I cannot stress this part enough: a sustainable organization needs exit plans for all senior leadership positions, including the Board Chair. Leadership turnover can destabilize an organization which can have negative impacts on morale, public and donor perception, funder confidence, the bottom line, and carrying out the mission. A sustainable organization can weather change with resiliency instead of falling apart. Even if internal successor selection is not an option, an exit plan is still essential for setting up the organization for success in times of change.

4: It Helps Prevent “One-Person Shows”

We’ve all seen it. Heck, some of us have been it. That person who becomes so entwined with their position that they are nearly inextricable from it. On one level, we love it because they are so good at getting things done. And so we look the other way, even when a little voice in our heads asks, “what would I do without them” and we don’t have an answer.

My rule of thumb is to always ask: what if so and so wins the lottery tomorrow and moves to Tahiti? What will the organization do? What is the plan? Thinking like this keeps the very real possibility of a future without this person in mind, which in turn spurs us to think about ways to diversify knowledge throughout the organization. (It’s also less morbid than the more common alternative, “what if so and so gets hit by a bus tomorrow?”). One-person shows can have negative consequences for the organization as well as the person, commonly leading to burn-out and overwhelm. Having a one-person show can also affect morale between them and other employees, sometimes breeding feelings of resentment from both parties. “Why do I have to do everything at this organization when Johnny over there does just one thing?”

There are many more reasons why succession planning is a sound option for your agency, group, or organization - these are only a few. Let me know if you have questions or need some guidance setting this up at your organization. Good luck!