Succession planning is not about cloning yourself or grooming your replacement. (What a terrible word choice.)
Succession planning is about setting yourself and others up for success right now.
When I work with executives who are proactive about preparing the next generation of leaders, we do four things:
The ideas I’m going to share aren’t revolutionary and certainly won’t cure you of all your organizational ills. However, these simple ideas have helped me as a business leader and many of my clients.
Before I started Rev 0, I was an engineer working on global energy projects. And like many of you, I learned some of my biggest lessons the hard way.
I’ve made more than a few mistakes along the way, and because of that, I approach role definition differently than the textbooks do. (And I’ve read the textbooks—I’m an industrial and organizational psychologist. We’re the people who define jobs after all.)
What follows is the process I use to create role charts and role descriptions. It will help you get clearer on where you need to let go and it will identify the roles you need to fill through hiring and outsourcing.
When people ask what you do, I bet you've said the phrase, “I wear multiple hats.”
If you're a business owner or senior leader, you bootstrap, you juggle, you keep it running. You’re the janitor, bookkeeper, web developer, engineer, project manager, and CEO - depending on the hour of the day.
But wearing all the hats isn’t a badge of honor. It’s a bottleneck, and it’s selfish and self-destructive because it keeps your business small and your stress level high.
Your success will come from letting go. Not all at once, but deliberately and strategically.
Will you make mistakes? Absolutely. You'll make some bad hires. You might have to fire a friend. Things will fall through the cracks. Clients might feel neglected.
Expect some things to go wrong as you begin to let go. But growth is on the other side, if you'll choose to wear fewer hats.
Organizational psychologists are concerned with the performance of people at work, and the single greatest predictor of whether someone will do a job well or not is whether they know what the job is. Role clarity is what we call it.
If people don’t know what their job is, they won’t do it well.
In my work, I primarily coach business leaders as they are creating an organization that they want to be part of. In nearly all my engagements, at some point or other, we have to struggle with the question: who does what?
My clients usually start by sharing their org chart with me, but that never answers the question. Especially in a small to medium-sized company.
So, I have them use a role chart. My role chart is a variation of what Gino Wickman and Michael Gerber talk about in their books, so this isn’t an idea I came up with. But in my application of it, I’ve made a few tweaks.
At the top, to use Wickman’s language, we have a visionary and an integrator. The dreamer and the doer. This is a powerful partnership that, unfortunately, many founders think they don't need. The chaotic visionary thinks they can run operations too, or the highly analytical integrator thinks doing good work each day is enough.
Building the partnership at the top is often the first big test of whether an organization is ready to grow (and likely to survive).
From there, we can see that every organization has four primary functions:
Even mission-driven companies and nonprofits fit this framework.
From there, you’ll notice no job titles, like Director of Engineering or Sales Specialist. Instead, we have simple descriptors of the role.
What is a role? It’s a part of a job. To define a role, break a position down into its parts. A role is the simplest part of a job. A job may be one role or multiple roles. A role could theoretically become a full-time job (or multiple) if your company is big enough.
Delivery Driver is an example of a role. In a small company, it may only be 2 hours on Friday that the founder fills the role. In a larger company, you might have 30 full-time delivery drivers, all performing the same work.
Roles answer the question: what needs to get done.
This chart is my attempt to capture a common starting point for any organization, but the individual roles will be unique to your business. A real estate company will have very different operational roles than an structural engineering firm. Operations tends to be the most unique to your business, while Sales/Marketing, Finance, and People are usually more universal.a
Start with our template. Scratch out what doesn’t apply. Add what’s unique to you.
I recommend you work with pen and paper – the messy, tangibleness of it helps me think better. You can also work digitally in Lucid, my favorite diagramming tool.
Get our template using this link: role chart template. You’ll need to create a Lucid account or login, then you can copy my template for free.
As you can see in the example, a role chart is different from an org chart in that one person’s name can appear in multiple roles. This is the magic of a role chart.
In this example, we have a four-person technology product company that outsources a few things.
Four people fill 22 roles.
For your company, first do a quick review of the chart, scratch out role titles that don’t apply, and write in your own.
Second, fill in the names of the people who currently do the work of each role. Start with yourself, put your name on every box you are responsible for.
How many roles did you find in your business?
How many are you personally filling? Five? Ten? Twenty? That’s your bottleneck.
Third, using the legend of star, circle, or arrow, you will begin to do some strategic planning. Label roles that you think need an immediate change.
Next, zoom out and ask:
When I did this exercise, it led me to:
Label your top three priorities (I recommend filling the gaps first, then letting go of a few things to other people in the organization, and finally making some strategic hires). After you've listed your priorities, get someone else's perspective: a mentor, a coach, or a business partner.
Congratulations! You’ve just done more strategic org planning in a few minutes than most entrepreneurs do in a year!
A Quick Note on Getting Help:
Letting go is hard. I’ve been there.
But if you’re stuck, get a coach to help you. I’ve hired business coaches, marketing coaches, sales coaches, and leadership coaches. They’ve helped me do this work better and faster.
You’ve probably been told to delegate more.
But in succession planning, we want to set ourselves and others up for success. Delegation doesn’t accomplish that. Delegating is a temporary reassignment.
We need to assign work. Unlike delegation, assignments give people ownership and accountability for meaningful work.
Assigning work is key, and to assign work well, I recommend using a role description.
A Role Description defines a role on a single page. It can be done for every single role on your role chart.
Did you identify 22 roles? Draft 22 one-page Role Descriptions.
This is not a job description, and you wouldn’t post this on Indeed to get applicants. This isn’t even for their HR file. This is a communication tool to be used in 1:1 meetings to create role clarity.
Download the form and use it to spell out:
The form also gives you space to outline what skills would lead to role mastery and what actions would lead to reward and punishment.
We need to spell this out clearly, because if you leave any ambiguity, someone will interpret it differently than you!
Take your top-priority role that you need to hire for, reassign, or outsource, and clearly define the role using the role description template. Use our examples (Bookkeeper Role Description, Sales/Marketing Role Description) as guides.
If you want role clarity, show it with a role chart, let people read it with a role description, and talk about it verbally. See, read, and hear. Use all the methods you can to remove ambiguity.
Obviously, your first role description won’t be perfect, and it’s not meant to be. It is meant to spark conversation.
Once your chart and role description are ready, talk about it.
Your final step in this exercise is to talk to the person who fills (or will take on) the role, or the person the role reports to.
Use the meeting to:
If you need a 1:1 framework, I’ve got a tool for that, too. [Click here for Better 1:1 Meetings]
Succession planning is about looking at your current organization as it is now, where it needs to be in the future, and what you can do to help everyone (yourself included) succeed in their roles.
To make this work:
Letting go is the hardest thing for any leader to do, but growth comes from letting go.