Leadership development may be the most important thing any company does. That’s why, every week, I review blogs and other publications that cover leadership development to find the very best leadership development posts. This week, you’ll find pointers to posts about leadership development if everyone can lead, CEO succession and why it goes so wrong, and how CEO succession starts with leadership development.
From Mark Busine: Leadership. All welcome.
“What if we applied the same vision to leadership? What if we embraced the idea that anyone and everyone should have access to the opportunity to lead? What impact could this have on organisations and society more broadly?”
From Korn Ferry: The risky business of CEO succession
“Commencing the succession for the chief executive officer (CEO), without first agreeing on the strategy and market factors that impact the role, can pose the highest risk to success in the process, prominent business leaders in Australia and New Zealand say. They shared their insights with Korn Ferry on the greatest risks related to CEO succession and the triggers, process, and outcome of considered, strategic CEO succession planning.”
From Åsa Björnberg and Claudio Feser: CEO succession starts with developing your leaders
“Two-thirds of US public and private companies still admit that they have no formal CEO succession plan in place, according to a survey conducted by the National Association of Corporate Directors last year.1 And only one-third of the executives who told headhunter Korn Ferry this year that their companies do have such a program were satisfied with the outcome. These figures are alarming. CEO succession planning is a critical process that many companies either neglect or get wrong. While choosing a CEO is unambiguously the board’s responsibility, the incumbent CEO has a critical leadership role to play in preparing and developing candidates—just as any manager worth his or her salt will worry about grooming a successor.”
From Claudio Fernández-Aráoz: Why Boards Get C-Suite Succession So Wrong
“New reports from McKinsey and PwC paint a very bleak picture of C-suite succession practices in today’s corporations. According to the first study, a survey of 1,195 executives, nearly half of those who had ascended to top-level positions in their firms said they were unable to align colleagues around the goals they set out in the new role, while more than a third admitted that they had failed to meet those initial objectives. PwC, meanwhile, calculated the economic cost of large global companies getting their most important C-suite appointment – CEO – wrong: well over $100 billion.”
