Running a technical support business is all about taking action and getting things done. Although, with little time set aside for planning we tend to focus primarily on support budgets and technology acquisitions. However, there is one future plan that—if done right—will have significant pay offs for your organization--succession planning. Simply put, succession planning is the art and science of grooming high-potential managers for top executive positions; allowing them to become an internal pool of potential executive talent. Succession planning does not just happen—it is a focused, ongoing effort—but the benefits will become evident the first time you lose a VP and don’t have to go outside the company to find a replacement. It’s all about developing a formal plan that allows your brightest managers to gain the skills necessary to become VP’s and beyond.

Of course, formal training in management is the first step to succession planning (I highly recommend that you learn more about the SSPA/Wharton Business School Technology Services Management Program) but there are several more things that you can do to add some interesting training situations to the overall plan.

Keys to Succession Planning

1.     Identify potential candidates – Start by reviewing the SSPA Top Talent Study (available to SSPA members in the research section of thesspa.com) to determine what drives your best people and the skill sets that they maintain. It is essential that you start the succession planning process by selecting the best possible people in your organization. I would bet that if I asked you to identify your top talent that it would not be hard to identify the few people that quickly come to mind. The SSPA study that I mention above is a very detailed work that helps you understand exactly what motivates and differentiates those top people from the rest of the pack.

2.     Establish an executive “mentor” for fast-track managers that have potential to become execs. The mentors should meet on a regular basis and discuss what execs do and how they act. Although this may seem like a very time consuming thing to ask executives to do most of them will readily accept the challenge of mentoring a bright shinning star in the company. The mentoring approach can be as formal as you want to make it, such as, formal project work under the mentor’s watchful eye, to going out for a beer after work a couple of times a month. The object here is to match potential executives with existing executives so that they can share the art of top-level management and evaluate the potential of the prospective candidate. I think back to my own career when I had an executive mentor and we developed a lifelong relation ship that is still in place today. Every time something good happened to me in my career, Ed was one of the first people I called and he was always proud of me.

3.     Build a “Leadership agreement” between the individuals and the execs that identifies what the company will do to further the development of selected individuals and what the individual will do to enhance their own skill set. For example, going to night school to take business classes would be a sign of an individual’s drive for advancement. This agreement should not be one sided where the company promises to do formal career building for the candidate, but rather, a mutual agreement that both parties will spend the extra efforts to make this happen. The company supplies the opportunities but the individuals have to commit to spending the extra effort and time required to succeed.

4.     Get industry exposure – Send selected people out to industry conferences with the specific task of finding new ideas that could benefit the company and then give them the responsibility to create a task force and implement one of them. There are plenty of industry conferences out there and both SSPA and AFSMI work hard at developing the best possible content for their conferences. Getting outside the walls of your company can be a great awakening as you learn how others get things done, focus on future plans, and have established a network of peers with different perspectives. As part of our succession planning process it is essential that our candidates don’t just show up at a conference to attend the social events. We must put them to work while they are out of the office and that means that they will need to create a trip report about everything that learned at the event. Reviewing their observations and recommendations provides us insight into how they think and helps to determine if they can really think like an executive.

5.     Benchmark against others – Set up site visits with other SSPA member companies and have potential execs tour the facilities looking for similarities and differences in the two organizations. If you really want to sharpen your skills in the technical services field then get out there and benchmark against your peers. This technique is a great place to test the aptitude of our potential executives because they have to know what questions to ask and then must be able to articulate their comparisons back to their team. Benchmarking visits require pre-planning so that the time spent is maximized and as much information is collected as possible in a short period of time. If you are not sure who your peers are then simply drop me an email and I will start the process of hooking you up.

6.     Exposure to other parts of the company – Selected individuals need to get exposed to all parts of an organization by either working on projects in that area or by spending time as a functional manager there. This “management rotation” provides an expanded knowledge of how the entire company functions. This rotation can be done through project management roles that interface outside of your department, such as, working with R/D, sales, or QA on projects that directly affect the effectiveness of technology services. What this does for the individual is enhances their multi-tasking skills, their communications skills, and their ability to get things done on time. Once more we are trying to expose executive type thinking into our prospects and what better way to do that than to hold them accountable for project completion with other departments.

The key to succession planning is that there must be commitment from both the executive management team and the selected individuals that have been identified. A typical succession plan could take a few years to fully implement but the extra effort will be worth it as we develop managers into executives and prepare for the future. If you have any questions about this topic feel free to send me a note at brose@thesspa.com.

About Bill Rose………………………………………………………………..

For almost two decades, Bill Rose has served as an energetic and articulate advocate for the service and support industry. The founder of the SSPA in 1989 and its chief executive for 15 years, Rose has over the last decade emerged as a global expert on best practices within the industry, and as a leading authority on ways to heighten efficiencies while at the same time building customer loyalty. Perhaps more than any other single individual, Rose is responsible for service and support becoming a highly valued, mission-critical department within the structure of Global 2000 enterprises.

Rose is also a widely acclaimed international speaker, and has authored a number of influential guides, including Managing Software Support, Automating Your Support Center and Taking Charge of Your Support Center, in addition to hundreds of industry articles. He has also been recognized as an "Industry Champion" by the CRM industry and as a "Call Center Pioneer" by Call Center Magazine.

In his new role as VP of Services Research, Rose continues to help drive the mission of SSPA, and maintains a close personal and professional interest in the service and support industry.