Steve Mostyn wrote a review of Noel Tichy's new book, SUCCESSION-Mastering The Make Or Break Process 
of Leadership Transition. If you are not familiar with Noel's work, he's known for leading GE's company leadership institute and transforming the leadership pipeline under Jack Welch. He is a trusted adviser on management succession to many leader companies.
His book examines why some companies fail and others succeed in training and sustaining the next generation of leaders. He reviews case studies of H-P, IBM, Yahoo, P&G, Intel, and J.C. Penny. Tichy concludes that the most important responsibility is to grow transformational leaders from the inside so that you never need to go outside.
This theory aligns nicely with our beliefs and teachings in the Facilitative Leadership Program-Building a Culture of Leadership and Accountability. In the program we spend time on The Role Descriptions necessary in high performance organizations. The role description of the CEO or President begins and ends with:
To make my organization the best in the business by any measure
By having at all times at least one person ready, willing, and able to take over my role and perform it better than I do.
There are many more items covered in the role description as outlined in Lee Thayer's book LEADERSHIP: Thinking, Being, Doing, and none more important than these two.
Do you have at least one person ready, willing, and able to take over your role and perform it better that you do?
If not, why not?
As Tichy concludes in his book:
‘CEO succession should not be and never will be only about selecting the best CEO from a pool of likely candidates. It must always be about building a continuously transforming succession pipeline carefully constructed and designed to grow truly transformational leaders on the inside. It is in this sense fundamentally about creating, coaching and developing leaders at all levels’.
Want to learn more about creating a high performance organization? Learn about our Facilitative Leadership Program.
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