Do you know this story?
Jessica has been with your company for 14 years and she has been a rock star. She is your “go to” person for all of your biggest clients. She knows every corner of your business. In fact, Jessica may know more about your business than you do.
Even Jessica’s team is a well-designed support crew aimed at keeping Jessica efficient and effective. They work together seamlessly with Jessica at the helm and her employees look to her as the unquestioned leader of the team. They trust her and she trusts them.
You’ve thought about doing some employee development in the past, but things are just going so well. You simply don’t want to rock the boat.
So you come into the office in a particularly good mood for your weekly meeting with Jessica. It’s always a pleasure hearing how Jessica will handle upcoming challenges and her plans for serving your customers. Life is pretty good.
And that is when Jessica tells you that she is taking another job.
You are stunned. Jessica has been offered a similar position for more money in a location that is closer to her family. She hates having to leave, but her mind is completely made up. She is nice, so she is giving you 3 weeks. But who is going to replace this key person? Your mind starts racing: “Do I even know enough to step into that role? How do we even keep the company operating?”
You start to spend more time with Jessica’s team to learn about their individual strengths. They are great people, but nobody seems to step up as a leader. You’ve had a few strong leaders join the company over the years, but they always seemed to leave after a short tenure. Jessica was so strong the extra leadership abilities seemed like a waste at the time.
In exit interviews, these strong leaders had complained about Jessica. They said that she was too controlling and was a micromanager. You listened, but you didn’t see any reason to change anything and lots of reasons not to change. Jessica is awesome. And now she’s leaving.
We see some trends when these things happen:
If you are currently going through this type of leadership vacuum, you are probably pretty busy right now. My advice is to work hard, take care of your team, and take care of your customer. Work through it and things will get better.
You can wait until the Leadership Vacuum comes, or you can prepare for it now. Preparing now not only helps you when a key leader decides to leave, it also helps you build a stronger organization.
Here are some steps you can take to build a Talent Pipeline for your company:
Businesses that do a great job in developing internal leaders are simply more profitable and earn much higher levels of engagement. And you may be surprised by the positive impact it will have!
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More about Don: Don Harkey is the Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer at People Centric Consulting Group. People Centric partners with clients to help them to create and implement high performance cultures through clear direction, effective systems, and engaged employees. Don learned the power of fostering a culture that creates high employee engagement when he was a senior-level corporate engineer overseeing millions of dollars in capital projects.
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