Building Your Own Succession Plan (So You Can Get That Promotion)

Part III in the Succession Planning Series

Ideally, organizations would be fully transparent about succession planning. There would be clear paths outlined for every single person’s professional journey, and fully funded budgets to execute on those plans.

Instead, most organizations view succession planning as something reserved for the C-Suite. This leaves us mid-level managers and ambitious coordinators stuck behind a plastic ceiling.

If you’re stuck at a job that doesn’t have an official roadmap for promotion, banking on HR or your executive leadership to someday figure out that YOU are the person they’ve been looking for will be a career-long waste of time.

You have to plan your own succession.

Escaping the “Too Valuable to Promote” Trap

Promotions are rarely ever given to the person who is “too valuable” in their current position. Think about it: if your manager sat down and looked at the organizational chart and realized that promoting you would cripple your current department, would they really take that risk?

The easiest way to become “too valuable to promote” is by being the secret-keeper. You become THE BEST at what you do to the point that you are the only person who knows how X donor database works or that no one else knows how to unclog Y operational bottleneck.

Information asymmetry might make you feel important, but it also makes you an enormous risk to the operation. In business-speak, you become a “single point of failure.”

Before your manager is going to promote you, they have to be confident that the organization won’t fall apart when you leave your current seat. How do you do that? You make yourself easily replaced.

How to Start Building Your OWN Succession Plan

Executive leadership is less about a title and more about how you carry yourself. When you start building the bridge between your current role and your desired role, you are demonstrating to your executive team that you think and act with strategic foresight.

Let’s walk through the process of how to build your own succession plan from the middle management level-up:

Document, Document, Document

Lean Sigma yourself. Pull out those five-whys and start asking yourself what are the cornerstone processes that you manage? Once you have your nuggets, start documentation. BUILD SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) for your daily, weekly, monthly tasks.

If you won the powerball tomorrow, when you walk out the door a new hire should be able to walk on your desk, open up your SOPs and keep the lights on. Knowledge hoarding creates an epic organizational risk, and prevents you from moving up because whoever comes after you has to learn everything YOU know FROM SCRATCH.

The more you can get out of your head and onto paper, the more your organization can safely run without you.

Start unofficially cross-training your replacements

It’s not about your title. Anyone can mentor anyone else. Stuck behind a desk? Look around at your team or staff and find someone who you think has potential. PROactively invite that person into your corner and start letting them shadow your more complex responsibilities.

Help them understand not just HOW to do your job, but why. what tasks are busy work and what are the mission critical items. What ABC vendor insists on sending paperwork via fax even though it drives you crazy.

You’re building your own bench depth. When you go to ask for that promotion, you’re no longer asking for a new title for yourself, you’re presenting your boss with a trained minion who is more than capable of handling your former responsibilities.

Make the Business Case for Promoting You… Upwards

Timeliness is everything. When the time comes for you to grab coffee with your leadership and actually ask to move up, they should already know how awesome you are because you’ve spent the last however-long living your best bench-building life.

However, when that conversation comes, don’t just rattle off a list of how great you’ve been. Executives think about tomorrow. They think about risk mitigation. When you ask to move up, you want your boss to see that promoting you isn’t a risk… it’s an operational solution.

Hey boss, I want to take the next step and be a Director. I know transitions can suck and create setbacks, so over the last six months I have created SOPs for my current coordinator responsibilities and have spent countless hours cross-training Sally/Tom on the critical functions of my desk. If I move into my new role, Sally/Tom is 100% capable of picking up my current workload without any loss of operational productivity.

Own. Your. Career.

I’ve worked for organizations with and without succession plans. Let me tell you, when there isn’t a formal plan in place it isn’t because your employer is sitting around saying “how can we NOT promote this person? !”

With rigid corporate hierarchies and a 24/7 news cycle, most companies are simply TOO DAMN BUSY keeping the lights on to strategize about how to promote YOU. By documenting your process, officially cross training your own replacement and building a detailed plan for succession, you just became your boss’s HERO.