SUCCESSION PLANNING AT EVERY LEVEL FOR THE FESTIVALS AND EVENTS INDUSTRY

By Ira Rosen, CFEE

According to Wikipedia, “succession planning is a process for identifying and developing new leaders who can replace old leaders when they leave, retire or die. Succession planning increases the availability of experienced and capable employees that are prepared to assume these roles as they become available. Taken narrowly, ‘replacement planning’ for key roles is the heart of succession planning.”

In the world of festivals and events, this definition can, and needs to be, expanded in one key way. The definition above refers to “experienced and capable employees.” In our world, we need to alter this definition to include volunteers, as without volunteers many of our organizations would cease to exist.

Succession planning can also vary greatly depending upon the type of organization that you work for and your status within that organization. Are you a for-profit company providing services to the industry? Are you a not-for-profit governed by a Board of Directors? Are you a governmental employee? Are you an employee? Are you a volunteer?

Although specific plans may vary based on your answer to these questions, the bottom line answer is the same: Everyone needs a succession plan; few of us actually have one. According to BoardSource, only 27% of not-for-profits have a formal succession plan. Our industry needs to adapt what many sports organizations refer to as “next person up.” If someone gets hurt, injured or leaves the organization, who is the next person to step up?

Most of us have health insurance and automobile insurance and many of us have life insurance. We have all of these things in order to account for things that happen beyond our control and to make sure we have the resources available to recover from an accident, an illness or in the case of life insurance, to provide for those whom we leave behind. We hope we never have to use our insurance, but we have it any way. We need to think of succession planning in the same way – perhaps we will never need it, but it’s important to have it nonetheless.

Why is this so important? Let’s take the example of the type of dedicated volunteers many of our organizations are fortunate enough to have. Jane has been the chairperson of our Operations Committee for 10 years. She started out as a committee member and has worked her way up in the organization to where she knows everything there is to know about Operations; who the vendors are, when the deliveries need to happen, when bids need to be prepared, who are the strong committee members, who are the key players with the City and basically every detail about everything. All of this lives in Jane’s head, because like many of us, Jane is a control freak! One week before your event, Jane has a major medical incident and winds up in the Intensive Care Unit of your local hospital. Clearly, everyone on your team feels terribly, but what about the operations of your event? How do we move ahead? How does our event happen?

A second example involves your not-for-profit festival organization and your Executive Director. Mary has been your one and only Executive Director and has been in the position for 20 years. She basically built the Festival from scratch and you are now very successful. No one in your organization has thought about succession, because everyone assumed Mary would stay forever. Much to everyone’s surprise, Mary has decided that it is time for her to move on and she gives your organization 2 months’ notice, which means she will be leaving upon the completion of the next festival. What do you do to replace her?

Clearly these two scenarios are very different, but both of them beg the question “What do we do now?”

In thinking about succession planning, we need to pursue two different avenues: emergency succession planning and strategic succession planning. These avenues are a bit different, but the formula for dealing with them is pretty standard. In both cases, there are five steps that can help us through the process.

Step One: Have a Plan

Just as in the world of risk management planning, the time to develop a succession plan is not in the middle of your replacement crisis. Whether it is for emergency succession or strategic succession, plans need to be put into place before you need them. Here are some key elements of the plan:

1. Commit Things to Paper (or the “cloud”)

Many of us walk around with things in our heads. In the case of both Jane and Mary, they know many things that no one else knows because they were always the people responsible for taking care of these things. Details as large as when the sponsorship renewals get done and when grant applications need to be filed, to as small as where we keep the keys to the storage trailer. In both an emergency succession and a planned succession, what we have in our heads is of no value to our team. This is not an easy thing to do, as writing things down makes us feel more “replaceable.” Keep in mind, none of us are irreplaceable. Additionally, make sure that the organization gets access to passwords before a person leaves. It is hard to change passwords without knowing the right one to start with!

2. Train for Succession

Whether you are an employee or a volunteer, if we care about our organizations, we want to ensure their sustainability in the future. Part of that organizational sustainability includes training others. It can be a formal training plan or an informal one, but whatever we do, we need to do something. Many festivals and events have great volunteer training programs, where people must serve as committee members before they are moved into leadership positions. The same ought to be true with our employees – find ones who want to grow and nurture them. It is an obligation we should all take seriously. If we commit to this, when we choose to move on from our positions, we are certain that our organizations will continue to thrive.

3. If we are replacing someone at a high level (CEO, Senior VP, President) should we consider having an interim leader?

This is a question best left to your organization, but in making that decision be clear about that person’s role and responsibilities, have a set of mutually agreed upon expectations (such as the interim leader training the new leader) and try to have a specific end date for the role.

Step Two: Understand Your Organization

Although succession planning can cause us great distress, it also presents a great opportunity for us to assess our organizational structure. Is our organization functioning at a high level, or are we just chugging along because of leaders who have been in their roles for a long time? Have we been doing the same thing for the past five years because we have become complacent? Are we still relevant? Are we continuing to fulfill our mission? Do we have clear goals, objectives and strategies? Do we understand the roles within our organizations, such as Board of Directors vs Staff responsibilities? Have we done a SWOT analysis recently? How about a strategic plan or a business plan? Clearly these explorations are more appropriate when we are doing a planned succession vs an emergency succession, but they are certainly important elements to consider at this time.

Step Three: Build a Team

Who needs to be involved in your succession planning? There is no clear answer for that, other than it needs to be a team made up of diverse stakeholders from within the organization, and in some cases people from outside your organization. The number and type of stakeholders will vary by situation, but typically the broader the participation in the process the more successful the outcome. If building succession for a volunteer position, be certain to involve other members of the committee. If building succession for key salaried leaders, be certain to involve your board, other staff, volunteers and perhaps even high level sponsors. At the executive level, it may be worthwhile to engage a search firm. Again, whatever the type and composition of the team, succession planning is most successful when managed by a team.

Step Four: Build Your Perfect (or Least Imperfect) Successor

First and foremost, recognize that the perfect successor does not exist. We all have ideas as to what the ideal candidate for a particular position might look like, but the chances of finding that exact person are extremely slim. Rather, what we need to do is figure out what the least imperfect solution might be. What are the ten key attributes that we are looking for in a candidate? What are the five most important ones? In searching for successful leaders, experience in our industry dictates a number of key elements and many of them live in the world of soft vs hard skills. The best teachers in the world can’t teach passion or teach anyone to care about their job. Unfortunately, we cannot learn about a person’s soft skills from a resume.

Also, we need to determine what level of training the person will need in order to fulfill their role. A highly skilled colleague of mine who has served in a number of leadership roles maintains that Executive Directors should not have to be trained to be an Executive Director. If they are qualified to fill that role, they may have to learn the hard skill associated with that organization, but they should not have to be trained to lead, to communicate, to motivate or to inspire.

Step Five: Execute the Plan

In executing the plan, one of the key elements is having a realistic timeline. “Realistic” is a floating target, however, based on your situation. In an emergency succession plan, time is by definition short, so your plan needs to be ready to go in an instant. In order to do this, all of the previous steps need to have been completed.

In the case of a strategic, planned succession, your timeline needs to be thought out and planned. In the opinion of this writer, any executive leader in an organization should be required by contract to give a minimum of 30 days’ notice. For our organizations, two weeks is completely inadequate and unprofessional. Clearly, there are exceptions to this rule, but we should try in all cases to have as much time as possible to complete an organized succession.

We should set benchmarks in the timeline including posting the job, gathering resumes, conducting round one interviews, conducting final interviews and decision making. Again, be realistic.

Conclusion: Succession planning is clearly not a topic most of us like to deal with. However, we don’t need to operate in a vacuum. Recognize that there are resources available to help us through this process. A number of national organizations which specialize in not-for-profit planning have great resources that address this topic. Some of these organizations include The Council of Non Profits and Boardeffect.com. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City has also put together a very comprehensive guide to the topic.

Succession planning means change; sometimes change that we don’t want. But as we all understand, the most successful organizations in both the for-profit and not-for-profit worlds are those that manage change effectively and efficiently. Clearly, we need to be this type of organization.

Ira L. Rosen; CFEE is an Assistant Professor with Temple University’s School of Sport, Tourism and Hospitality Management. He teaches several event management courses and is the Program Director for the School’s award-winning Event Leadership Executive Certificate Program. Additionally, for over thirty years he has owned and operated Entertainment On Location, Inc. (EOL), a full-service event consulting company based in New Jersey. EOL has done extensive production and consulting work for major events and clients throughout the world. Ira has spoken and done training programs around the world and he has written extensively on topics ranging from risk management to sponsorship to the financial and operational management of events. He has been a featured speaker at conventions and conferences around the world.

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