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Succession Management, Planning & Strategy
About Succession Management
The success of an organization depends on the continued quality of its leadership, which is why most CEOs and boards consider succession planning a top priority. Even when a company has strong talent in its leadership pipeline, it may not have the right people to fill executive roles or keen insights into the best candidates for key positions.
Cambria’s Approach
Cambria helps boards and executive management conduct a thorough audit of the current leadership team and potential future successors. Our depth of research and experience with leaders at the highest levels help define the requirements of key enterprise jobs and the best candidates for them.
Rigorous executive assessments reveal how potential successors stack up. Then Cambria’s executive coaching, development planning, and transition support move the right people quickly and seamlessly into their new roles.
Our Results
Cambria’s succession planning consulting goes beyond a robust talent review process and a focus on the next people in line to explore future business challenges and emerging leadership role requirements.
Our development initiatives uncover potential candidates’ fit for the top spots. We evaluate both sides of the equation to ensure a smooth transition of the right people into the right roles.
Addressing Your Key Challenges
The goals of succession planning are to ensure that an organization has the leaders capable of managing the business, and to provide a structure for development that is responsive to the changing nature of the business strategy.
Cambria helps organizations implement a succession planning strategy by building bench strength and ensuring the right people are in place to meet future needs and challenges.
How Cambria Helps
Our approach is comprised of four steps:
Identify Critical Positions
Cambria first considers the organization’s critical succession jobs and what it will take to fill them. Then role profiles are created which contain responsibilities, business challenges, and performance expectations in addition to functional knowledge, business experience, and personal competencies needed to succeed in the role. Our profiles account for what will be needed five to ten years from now as well as today.
Pool Candidates and Positions
Since many of these jobs share knowledge, skills, and business experience requirements as well as key leadership competencies, they can be grouped into pools based on their similarities. Pooling positions allows organizations to provide multiple potential opportunities for successor candidates. Talented individuals also see more potential opportunities for career development.
Identify Vulnerabilities
Organizations should ideally have two or three candidates ready for every position in a pool; if not, they need to consider hiring from the outside.
A different kind of vulnerability exists when an organization has a few people who could fit into many pools. In this case, there’s often a misperception that the organization has enough successors for a given position. Cambria’s talent review and succession management helps organizations identify high-potential talent that can be overlooked – particularly diverse talent – to address this issue.
Close the Gaps
Cambria helps clients identify assignments, experiences, and other learning opportunities that are valuable development options for high-potential talent. We also work with senior leaders to identify pivotal jobs that will provide critical development experiences for successor candidates.
With these strategies, Cambria helps clients close the gaps in succession management.