How This Digital Tool Simplifies Succession Planning

Without a comprehensive succession plan, the departure of a CEO can have a monumental effect on an organization’s future.

Take the resignations of Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, co-founders of Instagram. The sudden CEO and CTO departures sparked a wave of effects for both Instagram and its parent company, Facebook. Facebook’s stock value sunk, user privacy concerns rose, and questions on the overall stability of the company’s leadership emerged.

Though not all CEO departures are as dramatic as Instagram’s, the potential disruption incited by a leadership transition can have major consequences for internal functions and public perception of a company. That’s why comprehensive succession planning is essential for modern enterprises of all sizes.

CEO departures are at an all-time high

Challenger Gray reports that CEO turnover reached a new high in 2018, with over 1,452 CEOs leaving their posts.

The increase in turnover means succession planning must be a top priority.

Succession planning ensures new executive leadership is adequately prepared and supported when they step into their new role. In order to make a smooth handoff, your succession plan should include a few main components:

• Sharing all essential information and resources
• Active involvement from the outgoing executive
• Full integration with the strategic plan
• System in place to identify gaps in the succession

It may sound straightforward, but in the modern digital workplace, succession planning must take into account the need for incoming leaders to be fluent in a wide range of platforms and apps.

Without a deep understanding of how the business’s internal and external systems operate, it will be impossible for a new leader to raise business performance to the next level.

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A digital solution for a digital challenge

An alarming number of CEOs fail to meet the technical requirements of their new role. HBR estimates that 40% of new CEOs fail to meet performance expectations in their first 18 months.

As digital tools play an increasingly important role in business strategy and day-to-day operations, a more capable digital solution is integral to adequately train your new leader.

While CEOs aren’t “in the trenches” of many enterprise tools like mid-level employees, they are still expected to master and perform on a variety of tools. In-line digital solutions, such as a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP), provides one of the most efficient ways for CEOs to learn these new skills and thrive in their new role position.

CEO onboarding has to be fast

We often discuss the importance of what leading HR expert Josh Bersin calls “learning in the flow of work,” or firsthand, experiential learning. Training methods that enable employees and leaders to gain new skills while actually completing tasks drastically improves knowledge retention and speeds up onboarding.

A digital adoption platform supports successful CEO onboarding in a few primary ways.

1. Reliable and effective training. It’s imperative to ensure newly installed executives have access to all training materials, information, and resources whenever they need it. While mentors are an important part of onboarding, completely relying on others to implement training will most likely lead to missed information and unanswered questions. On the other hand, a DAP can instantly direct a user to any information with a single click.

2. Contextual guidance. On-screen, real-time guidance that helps new users complete processes is paramount to learning in the flow of work. Without a solution that provides tailored advice in the moment of need, onboarding will remain slow and laborious. Based on predefined algoithms, a DAP assess a wide range of user contextual factors in order to deploy the right prompts at the right time. From there, the platform guides the user through any process, step-by-step.

3. In-depth view of an organization’s current state using tech. Finally, a DAP enables new executives to see exactly how employees are using the organization’s enterprise software. Now more than ever, CEOs must play a lead role in designing the organization’s digital strategy. To do so effectively, he or she must understand how employees are currently using software. The DAP’s analytics capabilities provide a complete look at how many active users are on a platform, which processes have the most friction, where users drop off, and where optimization is required.

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Set up your succession planning efforts for success

Incorporating digital tools to aid succession planning in your business is essential for helping new leadership succeed.

Without an efficient way to onboard new leaders, ensure around-the-clock access to support, and enable them to see how employees currently use software, the risk of failure at the onset of their term rises.

Digitizing your succession plan lets you guarantee all of the right information is passed on at the right time. Using a digital adoption platform to train incoming executives will minimize disruption and get the new CEO up to speed.

By WalkMe Team

WalkMe pioneered the Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) for organizations to utilize the full potential of their digital assets. Using artificial intelligence, machine learning and contextual guidance, WalkMe adds a dynamic user interface layer to raise the digital literacy of all users.