This guidance tells you how to structure your briefing to your team around Simple Succession Planning.

This briefing is really one that works for organizations, but it’s great for an individual manager too. If you’re a director, and you have managers reporting to you, you could use this simple meeting to brief everyone and answer questions.

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How to create a dead-simple Succession Planning Form.

If you want to be good at succession planning, it’s an ongoing process. In our first cast in this series, we told you to get started, just think about who’s ready now, and who’s ready next, and if nothing else, write them down on a napkin. Here’s a really good napkin that will impress your boss.

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This guidance tells you how to use performance evaluations to improve your basic succession planning.

Even simple succession planning requires paying attention to the bigger picture. One of the things a lot of managers do is just say to themselves, who’s my best direct? This isn’t always wrong. It’s often right. But when it is wrong, it shows a lack of simple preparation. Here’s the first step in your preparation.

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This guidance recommends the ‘Ready Now/Ready Next’ Approach to Succession Planning.

Every really effective executive spends a great deal of time on the people in their organization. Who’s good, who’s struggling, who’s doing what we need them to do, who’s taking up too many resources, who’s creating conflict where they oughtn’t. This is because the core responsibility of an executive is to ensure the future profitability of the organization.

That means you’ve got to know who’s going to fill what roles in the near term. Further, based on what the market is going to do in the next 5 years, where is the organization strong or weak relative to that in human capacity, and therefore what hiring/development needs to happen to create the future we want or meet the future we think is going to happen to us.

Here’s how to do Succession Planning now for you and your team.

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This guidance recommends how to further your succession planning efforts by extending your network to your directs.

Succession planning is something that most managers think happen at the top of their organization. That is, they think it happens at the top if they think of succession planning at all, or if they even know it's done at their firm.

At Manager Tools, though, we know that it happens at all levels at those firms who are especially well managed. And, even if your firm doesn't do it at all, you can apply its principles to make yourself and your team more effective. Think of it this way: if you want to go on vacation and not have to answer mail and be on conference calls and respond to every single issue, you need to think about succession planning. That is, you need to think, who is going to replace me, and how are they going to get ready to do it well?

One of the problems with asking your team to step up is they don't know the people you do. They don't have the connections you do, they don't have the relationships you do, that make things easier for you than for them. (You can actually think of this as part of the goodwill you develop in your job. When you change companies, part of the reason things are harder is because you lose all that goodwill.)

So, we need to extend our network to our directs.

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This cast concludes our conversation on the Rule of 150, how it affects the growth of small companies and organizations, and how to address it.

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This cast describes The Rule of 150, how it affects the growth of small companies and organizations, and how to address it.

We've mentioned the Rule of 150 several times in our recommendations over the years. We've always hesitated to make it into a cast, because by itself it's just an idea. If we were just to describe it, it doesn't meet our test of actionable. Actionable-ness – now there's a word – is at the heart of all that we do.

But in a recent engagement with a smaller firm, we realized that we were making recommendations around it, as opposed to simply discussing it as a theory. And, in fact, we have been making recommendations around it to smaller clients. And here they are. Keep in mind that we believe this rule applies to larger organizations too… but in divisions and silos and groups and regions and plants and factories and warehouses and distributions centers and call centers, versus the entire firm. Just because you work at a 10,000+ person firm doesn't mean you haven't – or won't – experience the Rule of 150.

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This cast concludes our conversation on LinkedIn and what it means for Managers.

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This cast reviews our recent Career Tools guidance on LinkedIn, as well as highlights LinkedIn's recent Fortune magazine cover story, and recommends some basic LinkedIn behaviors for managers.

About a year ago, Wendii created podcast content for us about LinkedIn, the digital social media professional website. At the time, Mark hesitated to publish it, because he didn't feel that it was content that would be timeless, and he wasn't sure of LinkedIn's reach.

We strive for all of our content to timely for many – because they're facing the very problem we're addressing. We also strive for all of our content to be timeless – that is – they'll still be of value to someone facing that problem 20 years from now.

But over the past year, two things have changed. First, Mark has realized that when it comes to digital tools, there is very little that we can say will be timeless. The digital world changes…well, too fast for "timeless". Also, there's far too many people saying EVERYTHING is timely, that being new is enough to make something valuable, which is of course silly. But with that in mind, it's still true that some digital tools – and perhaps other tools and situations – are something less than permanent in management, but need addressing. So, Mark came to realize that we could make recommendations for certain tools that are less than timeless.

The other thing that changed was the growth of LinkedIn. We had heard so many cases of LinkedIn playing key roles in recruiting, and careers in general, that we could no longer in good conscience let so many managers and professionals simply stumble through their profile development.

So, Wendii's work came to pass recently, and we recorded a multi-part series on LinkedIn on Career Tools.

Within 5 days, the cover story of the latest Fortune magazine was about LinkedIn could 'fire up' your career. The cover picture was someone sitting in a desk chair taking off like a rocket. Probably a little much, but at least if you see it on a newsstand, you'll know what you're looking for. We recommend Fortune, and this might be a good issue to start with, though we'll detail the cover article pretty well here. We take full credit for convincing Fortune to figure out how important LinkedIn is.

We believe that LinkedIn is important enough in the professional world that managers ought to know about it, so this is a career topic that we can talk about at Manager Tools. In this cast, we'll review the basics of the Career Tools content, review the Fortune article, and then make some specific recommendations for managers in a professional world that includes LinkedIn.

The Career Tools Content

1. Career Tools Recommends LinkedIn
2. First, Complete Your Profile
   1. This Is Not Your Resume
   2. Employment History
   3. Education
   4. Other Sections
3. Photos Aren't Necessary – And Must Be Done Right
4. Connect With People You Know
   1. Contact Settings
5. Ok, So I'm On, What Now?
   1. Recommendations
   2. Groups
   3. Questions and Answers
   4. Job Board

The Fortune Article

1. Accenture Will Hire 50,000 People This Year – 40% Through Social Media
2. Facebook is For Fun, Tweets Have a Short Shelf Life
3. LinkedIn Had 17MM Visitors In February 2010
4. Oracle Met Their CFO on LinkedIn – ORACLE!
5. Professionals Are Researching Sales Contacts in Advance of Sales Meetings
6. Present Your Skills Attractively; Pack Your Profile With Keywords
7. Connect Through Groups
8. Feedback is Different/Better Than Facebook
9. Recruiting Cost Savings Can Be Enormous
10. Heidrick & Struggles Is Now A Leadership Advisory Firm – Heidrick & Struggles!
11. Pictures Are Iffy – Even to The Founder

Manager Tools Guidance – Use LinkedIn To Find Your Bench

1. Add People You Meet To Your Network
   1. Keep In Touch
   2. Whom THEY Know May Pay Dividends
2. Join Groups That Have Relevance To You
3. Keep Track Of Your Bench (And Network) With LinkedIn

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This cast describes a quick and dirty way to choose an interim replacement or number two for your role as manager.

Manager Tools recommends every manager have a designated "number 2": someone who fills in for us when we are unavailable. Whether we're incommunicado, on vacation, at an offsite without communication, we recommend each manager have NAMED someone to be in charge in our absence. The question is, how do we do it? How do we choose? Here you go!

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