How many times have you experienced the following:
You have a motivated, talented, energetic school leader with an idea. You are intrigued and you support their efforts. Over time, with resources and significant effort, a signature program develops. Families speak about this program as they look to your school. Eventually and inevitably, the leader of that program leaves. Whether they retire, move, or just continue their leadership journey, there is neither the road map nor the systems in place to carry on the program at the level they have done for years. The institutional memory and the years of investment are gone as you are left scrambling trying to fill the gap created with the departure.
This is reactive, stressful, and expensive, of course. It is also all too common in schools. The good news is it is also avoidable.
Succession planning–common in the corporate world, increasingly common in the nonprofit world, and exceedingly rare in schools—could be a solution.
First, what is a succession plan?
A succession plan, perhaps self-explanatory, lays out each responsibility a leader has and describes a plan to make sure that if that leader is absent or leaves the organization, those details get taken care of in both the short term and long term. Overall, the idea sounds pretty simple, yet any longtime school person likely immediately sees the greater issue. Very few roles in most schools have current job descriptions, and even those that do are unlikely to have the true list of responsibilities delineated. Sometimes, there is even a self-created mystique around an individual’s job projecting the myth that no one else could do the job or could do the job as well. Perhaps those two issues are one and the same. It’s difficult to pass on a job effectively when there is no transparency about what the job entails.
What needs to be done:
- Responsibilities: Before creating a succession plan, an updated job description is necessary. While it might not start as granular as will eventually be needed, generating a list of broad duties within a position is important.
- Time Allocation: Next, getting a sense of how much of a person’s time is spent on each set of duties, even roughly, is incredibly helpful as you begin to think about how to reallocate these responsibilities in the short and long term.
- People: Start making a list of who directly depends on their work. Who reports to them? Who comes to them for advice, questions, or decisions? Who do they collaborate with? What external relationships do they have exclusively?
- Information: What data or files do they alone have access to? What physical artifacts do they produce or collect on a regular time interval?
- Schedule: What regularly scheduled meetings are they responsible for?
With these inputs, it is relatively straightforward to first create or update a job description. This sets the stage for an emergency coverage plan. As the name suggests, this is a step-by-step guide that can be followed to make sure nothing falls through the cracks for a leader who is absent unexpectedly for a period of time. Lastly, a succession plan can be drafted.
In addition to thinking about the long-term path forward with the planned departure of a leader, a succession plan has the added bonus of planning for the building of capacity within your school while the leader is still there. In a well-constructed succession plan, the leader is thinking about who they can bring into what aspects of the work immediately or in the near future. Folks in schools are often hungry for opportunities to learn directly from and with leaders and their added insights and ideas can provide innovations and logical adjustments to process.
A secondary benefit of this work, especially when done across a leadership team, is the opportunity to identify and eliminate duplications in efforts or to more systematically consider the decisions on who is doing what. This process can also help identify workload and responsibility issues. Who has too much and where can you trim the role? Who might have additional capacity? What work no longer needs to be done and what work is not being done that needs to be?
I know only too well how even reading this project list may seem overwhelming for any school administrator in the frenetic weeks between Thanksgiving and Winter Break. This is exactly the type of task that is incredibly hard to carve out time for when your daily to-do list only grows. Yet, what would be the time impact of losing your Global Initiatives Director, your Outdoor Education Director, or your CFO at the end of the year, or even next week?
This process, when done well, can both create efficiencies and set up the school to save significant resources (money AND time) in the long run. It takes a proactive approach to avoid the chaos (at best) or the institutional loss (at worst) of a planned or unplanned departure of a school leader.
Keep in mind that this is not meant to be top-down work. Each individual program or division leader could complete steps 1 through 5 above. Perhaps this could serve as a school-year leadership team project? Laid out during a summer retreat? Or perhaps you want to bring in a trusted outside resource to help with the work. We’ve partnered with schools on this work for Heads, Board Chairs, and entire leadership teams. Reach out if you want to learn more.
