Succession planning builds adaptable, emotionally intelligent leaders ready for complexity. It goes beyond replacing roles, pairing rigorous assessment with real growth. By developing latent talent aligned to organisational values, it secures future leadership and long-term success.
Succession planning must be cultural, not procedural. Pipelines grounded in organisational ethos—reinforced through mentorship and rotations—pass on tacit knowledge and identity. Transparent engagement builds trust, making leadership transitions fair, strategic, and resilient.
Succession planning sustains organisations by preparing for leadership transitions while protecting values and goals. It fosters equity, transparency, and cultural alignment, using mentorship and collaboration to balance stability with innovation and build resilient leadership systems.
Empathy strengthens leadership by building trust, respect, and belonging. It supports fairness, psychological safety, and better decisions. Though it risks burnout, empathy remains essential for ethical, resilient, and sustainable organisations.
Misused metrics distort behaviour, erode trust, and weaken goals. Used wisely—aligned with values, ethics, and systems thinking—they support better decisions and create environments where people and organisations can thrive.
FranklinCovey’s Leading at the Speed of Trust offers helpful tools but oversimplifies trust. A satisficing approach—grounded in practical action and shaped by culture and relationships—builds trust iteratively, supporting resilient, sustainable leadership.
Trust underpins leadership and shared purpose. FranklinCovey frames trust as measurable through behaviours like integrity and capability, boosting speed and lowering costs. Yet trust endures only when leaders also attend to relational and contextual realities.
Gold of the Desert Kings is an engaging leadership simulation promoting strategy and teamwork under pressure, but its focus on competition overlooks emotional intelligence and ethics. Coupling it with formal leadership theory could yield deeper, longer-lasting learning.
Karl Popper's theory of falsification provides a powerful framework for modern leadership. By embracing the principles of falsification, leaders can foster innovation, agility, and resilience in their organisations. This also allows the evolution of our understanding by discarding theories that do n
Anyone can ask questions, but effective questioning is a leadership skill. Senior leaders must use strategic inquiry—not just operational queries—to guide teams through uncertainty, strengthen decision-making, and foster innovation.
The first in a series on learning from history and its value for organisational decision-making. Today, those who draw lessons from the past risk being labelled “on the wrong side of history,” much as dissenters in business face exile for challenging dominant narratives.
Organisations that are above average in their track record of developing leader-managers put an emphasis on creating challenging opportunities, not just for aspiring talent but for incumbent Line Managers who can too easily become stale.
