White paper by Dr. Matt Barney, Founder & CEO – LeaderAmp

Great leaders ensure that their legacy lives beyond their tenure. The desire to develop successors is ancient, but the innovations needed to mitigate risk of leadership success are new. The first version of succession management, version 1.0, was messy. Company leaders announced that they were leaving, and the firm scrambled to find a replacement.

In response, Succession 2.0 evolved to formalize succession planning. This included formal plans anchored on assessments that were inputs to GE’s famous 9-Box grid that plotted potential and performance. But the logistics of this formal approach are affordable only to very large firms. Succession planning processes are also tedious, untimely, and often fail to proactively groom talent.

This white paper introduces Succession 3.0 – a transition from succession planning to succession risk management. Using a private banker’s portfolio approach to managing high net worth human capital, it frames leader investments as a special case of operational risk mitigation. It uses new science and technology to set standards, precisely measure individual leaders quarterly, forecast the likely growth of each unique leader, and decide on appropriate developmental investments.