Fall 2014 issue of Horizons

MANUFACTURING & DISTRIBUTION

∙ CFO or controller who handles many key roles and relationships

vacation and the panic button was pushed because only she or he had the answer to a critical question raised by another employee, customer or vendor. What would the company do if that same person was away due to an extended medical condition? Have you cross-trained others to take over the responsibilities of your key employees to avoid critical missteps that could paralyze your business for several hours, days or weeks? With that challenge in mind, take a few minutes to imagine those opportunities that might unfortunately impact business and think about how your company and management team will react.

∙ CEO or owner of the business

Ideally, your team would be able to handle such a short-term and long-term loss with no disruption to your business. Failure to develop a short-term emergency succession plan, as well as a long-term succession plan could leave your business vulnerable to your competitors.

Make Sure You Have Short- and Long-Term Plans

A short-term plan is essentially a survival phase to make sure all of the critical processes and responsibilities run smoothly in the days and weeks ahead until the key owner of the responsibilities either returns or is replaced with someone that will fulfill the role on a permanent basis. What are the key issues that need to be addressed? The best person to answer the question is the current owner of the issue and process. They should have ownership of outlining how someone might fill their “boots” while they are away including training others and sharing knowledge about critical tasks and responsibilities. The long-term succession plan may not be as easy because not every organization has the next person’s successor on board, hired or identified. Too often a long-term succession plan is not in place or is not possible with higher level management positions.

What if you lost one of the following key personnel?

∙ Key salesman/relationship manager with your top customer

∙ Production supervisor

∙ Research and development team leader

∙ Procurement manager who interacts daily with your entire supply chain

A long-term succession process should include:

∙ Identification of the key responsibilities and coaching and mentoring of the successors of each critical position ∙ Determine potential successors or recognition that there is not currently someone in house that can fill the positions

page 56 | horizons Fall 2014