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Measuring Success:
Learning’s Positive Impact on Business
September 24th — 26th, 2008
Hotel del Coronado, Coronado, California

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Features

Published March 2008

The CLO Succession Plan

  Brian Summerfield

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Replacing a departing leader can be challenging, especially when that leader is yourself. Chief learning officers need to put in significant preparation for the transition to ensure their successors have what they need to keep the learning function running smoothly.

Andrew Johnson. Clement Attlee. Georges Pompidou. These names might ring a bell for some readers, but most probably don’t know much — if anything — about the lives of these people. Yet, they are the political successors to renowned leaders Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, respectively. They have one more thing in common: While they all had varying degrees of success in office, none of them managed to live up to the bar of leadership set by their predecessors.

As these and other examples demonstrate, filling the vacuum brought on by the departure of an effective leader can be challenging. As many chief learning officers strive to strategically integrate employee development with a holistic approach to talent management, most probably give some serious thought to the issue of succession planning within their organization’s C-suite. By laying the groundwork for a smooth transition of leadership, they are ensuring the investment of time, knowledge and effort put in by former executives won’t be wasted or lost.

However, as CLOs prepare their enterprise for the exodus of various organizational leaders, they need to make sure they don’t neglect an important one: themselves. The following examples offer some suggestions departing learning executives might want to consider before they pass along the keys to the learning kingdom.

Before
For nearly five years, Carol Willett has served as chief learning officer at the U.S. Government Accountability Office (U.S. GAO), which investigates and audits the expenses in the budgets formulated by Congress. Even though she’s still a couple of years away from leaving the organization, she’s already been thinking about handing off her responsibilities for more than a year now.

“When I came here, I fully intended to stay for seven years,” Willett said. “At the halfway mark [of my tenure], I started working on this, in addition to doing what I came here to do. I thought it would take between two and two-and-a-half years to prepare everyone, so that’s the reason for my timing. I had a lot of building to do, I’m still building and I’ll be building until the hour I leave. But I’m also dividing my attention now to look at how I successfully transition what I’ve built.”

As part of that preparation, she’s spent a significant amount of time trying to get the managers underneath her to approach issues and decisions with the entire organization in mind, rather than only focusing on their narrow functions. Additionally, Willett has been putting together what she calls the “CLO’s notebook” that explains different aspects of the job in detail. Because she isn’t in the position to anoint a particular successor, she’s posted that to a public folder that her entire staff can access.

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