Who cares about succession planning? As an organization or an aspiring senior leader, you must care. Proper succession planning by an organization and its senior leaders is one of the keys to organizational resilience and long-term success. I know this from many Baldrige Award-winning organizations that have done effective succession planning and continued to thrive through generations of leaders.

I also know this from personal experience with high-performing organizations that haven’t prepared a next generation of leaders, or abandoned those leaders when it came time for CEO succession. Frequently, those “outside” leaders assumed that the old leadership and organizational performance systems were bad, the organizations subsequently stumbled, and sometimes they never recovered. Their high-performing organizational cultures were destroyed. In two instances with Fortune 500 companies, the former CEOs were brought back to rescue the organization.

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