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Succession Planning

Published May 2008

Mentoring's Role in Succession Planning

  Mark Brenner

It's no surprise more than 80 percent of senior executive recruits change employers within two years of hire. It takes a lot to make today's knowledge worker happy. Once top talent is recruited into an organization, significant efforts must be made to develop, promote and ultimately to retain them. Yet, many succession management initiatives go down a dead-end path because traditional program efforts create an environment that works against the goals their designers had in mind.

There is also a widespread misunderstanding of how adults actually learn and develop, combined with an overreliance on technological solutions to the human challenges involved in creating, filling and maintaining a consistently reliable talent pipeline. The water gets even muddier because corporations continue to rely on unscientific assessment tools in their efforts to fill holes in their organizational charts.

Mentoring figures prominently in many of these dead-end succession scenarios because corporations default to mechanistic talent approaches to a developmental process that at its core is nonlinear, nonanalytical and unambiguously human in nature. As one of several facets of a robust succession management platform, mentoring cannot be delivered in assembly-line fashion.

Mentoring is talked about a great deal, but few people understand the high bar an effective mentor must clear. It requires a very personal and even intimate relationship. It's much more about EQ (emotional intelligence) than it is about IQ — it requires a high level of interpersonal finesse, particularly on the mentor's part. Mentoring must support the human learning process. Otherwise, its ability to transform individuals and organizations will be limited.

Train Pets, Not People

Most succession management programs look wonderful on paper but discount the complexity of human relationships. In the modern workplace, programs play out inside the sterile, white space surrounding the boxes, circles and arrows of a company's flow chart. Highly structured, formulaic processes generally follow the same flawed pattern as they attempt to:

• Address a perceived need for managers and junior executives to be schooled in leadership, performance management, conflict resolution and corporate citizenship.
• Create and implement a curriculum built around critical topics.
• Put a spark in or otherwise balance out the classroom elements of the design with a simultaneously running high-touch program.
• Match participants with an appropriate senior executive in a mentoring relationship.

Further, a structured, traditional mentoring approach may not always work because no one truly knows how to meaningfully or effectively pair people. Succession management often ignores that necessary development activities discount EQ in favor of IQ. To ascend the higher regions of a career arc, nearly all the leverage is in a person's EQ development and ability to cultivate:

• Accurate self-awareness.
• Self-confidence and steward-like behavior toward colleagues and the world.
• Thorough trustworthiness.
• Transparency and authenticity (perceived by others as being an "open book").
• Full self-control.
• Flexibility and a welcoming attitude toward change.
• Passion for learning and achieving.
• Consistent optimism and resilience.
• Organizational astuteness.
• Empathy as a teacher/mentor.
• An image as an inspiring role model.

The goal of an effective mentoring process is for high-potential individuals to find their muse and true voice, which in turn allows them to focus their best qualities on their careers and personal lives.

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