HR Pulse - Winter 2007 - (Page 38) Heading off a Leadership Drain How Two Organizations Identified and Nurtured Top Talent By Eric Hanson, Ph.D. 38 With a wave of pending retirements and little or no internal bench strength, many healthcare organizations will be scrambling in the years ahead to replace top executives. HR Pulse Winter 2007 ould you consider putting a doctor who has never performed surgery in one of your operating rooms? The chances are the answer is a resounding “no.” While it’s not literally a matter of life or death, selecting senior leaders is a similar highstakes situation that requires careful due diligence. But rather than putting a patient at risk, it’s the health—and possibly the future—of your organization that hangs in the balance. Replacing senior leaders is a significant challenge. It requires a calculated risk that the anointed replacement will succeed in delivering clinical and operational excellence and providing a sound vision for the organization’s future. If that risk doesn’t pay off, the organization can lose substantial time and money, not to mention the confidence of board members and staff, the community and other stakeholders. W With a wave of pending retirements and little or no internal bench strength, many healthcare organizations will be scrambling in the years ahead to replace top executives, senior vice presidents and directors. In most cases, that means successors will need to come from the outside—a less-than-desirable solution because of the high failure rate of externally sourced executives. When no succession management system is in place, 49 percent of those who are promoted to top management jobs fail, according to a 2003 DDI Leadership Forecast Study. Many healthcare organizations are investing much more time and energy on the selection process than in the past, and often they find that the new leaders they so desperately crave can be found internally, in the ranks of earlyand mid-career professionals. In this article, we look at two well-respected organizations that faced the challenge of replacing several top executives in the near future. One looked for immediate replacements >>
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