Succession Planning - Extending Your Network

This guidance recommends how to further your succession planning efforts by extending your network to your directs.

Succession planning is something that most managers think happen at the top of their organization. That is, they think it happens at the top if they think of succession planning at all, or if they even know it's done at their firm.

At Manager Tools, though, we know that it happens at all levels at those firms who are especially well managed. And, even if your firm doesn't do it at all, you can apply its principles to make yourself and your team more effective. Think of it this way: if you want to go on vacation and not have to answer mail and be on conference calls and respond to every single issue, you need to think about succession planning. That is, you need to think, who is going to replace me, and how are they going to get ready to do it well?

One of the problems with asking your team to step up is they don't know the people you do. They don't have the connections you do, they don't have the relationships you do, that make things easier for you than for them. (You can actually think of this as part of the goodwill you develop in your job. When you change companies, part of the reason things are harder is because you lose all that goodwill.)

So, we need to extend our network to our directs.