As we begin a new year, many business leaders will be looking ahead to the future and taking stock of the current direction of their business. Even if your organisation is enjoying success at the moment, forward planning is vital to ensure this momentum can be maintained.
It is particularly vital to ensure you have plans in place for when you or another member of your senior leadership team retires or steps away from their role. The importance of this kind of business legacy planning has come into sharp focus since the start of the pandemic, and will continue to be seen as a top priority in 2022 and beyond.
In this blog post, we will explore the most important elements to consider when developing a robust legacy plan for your organisation, while underlining the core role that good recruitment plays in your business continuity planning.
What are the essentials of legacy planning?
Whether or not you intend to retire in the foreseeable future, business legacy planning should always be factored into your company’s overall strategy and structure. After all, managers and directors will often need to leave their roles for unexpected reasons, and the organisation needs to do everything it can to ensure this does not create a disruptive brain drain or talent gap.
In order to ensure that key leadership responsibilities can be smoothly passed from one generation of business leaders to the next, there are several key factors to consider:
● Nominating potential successors to take over leadership roles if they become vacant unexpectedly
● Providing training to ensure that every key management process and responsibility can be replicated and fulfilled by others within the organisation
● Ensuring that key business data and information are findable, accessible and easily comprehensible for future successors
● Offering management training opportunities and giving prospective business leaders a chance to shadow the existing management team
● Devolving decision-making responsibilities across a larger management team or the entire organisation, to ensure that one person does not have complete control
By bearing these essentials in mind and developing a firm strategy for how to enact them, your business will be much better prepared to manage key leadership transitions, as and when they need to happen.
How recruiting today can help your business tomorrow
One of the best ways of strengthening your business continuity planning for tomorrow is to make the right investment in recruitment today, and ensure that the people you are bringing in now are ready and able to help your organisation grow and thrive into the future.
There are various ways in which a strong recruitment policy can form a strong foundation for your business legacy planning strategy:
● If your current staff lacks the right profile of a future business leader, you will be able to externally recruit a candidate with the exact right combination of skills, experience, vision and forward outlook to meet your needs
● By hiring an external candidate with the intention of developing them as a successor, you will be able to shape and mould their development to maintain leadership continuity. This can range from knowledge of your business processes to best practice on how to deal with specific clients, vendors and industry partners
● Bringing in more people will diversify and expand the range of available skills within your organisation, making the company better equipped to handle future challenges, and giving you a wider pool of potential leadership talent to draw upon
● Hiring skilled workers will help your company to succeed and grow in the short and medium term, ensuring it will be able to enter future transitional periods with a strong balance sheet and an attractive reputation as an employer
As such, taking a proactive approach to hiring can be one of the best ways of ensuring that your organisation is ready for any and all future challenges, and that its success can be maintained even after the current leadership team moves on.
How can we help?
Recruiting the right staff to support your legacy planning can be a complex process, requiring a holistic view of the company and its culture, and an intelligent approach to finding a candidate who will be able to step up at the right time.
Calling upon the expertise of an experienced recruitment agency can make this process much easier. Employment Solutions has been helping organisations with all aspects of their recruitment for more than 20 years, and our team is adept at finding the right candidates and coordinating effective hiring processes, giving you confidence that you are bringing in the best people for the long term.
To learn more about how Employment Solutions can help you with your business legacy planning, call the team on 0161 839 5353, or complete the contact form below and we will be in touch soon.