Senior Advisor, Clancy Murphy, on the potential role of AI in leadership succession.
Senior leadership succession is a regular feature across the business pages and LinkedIn. BlackRock have been planning Larry Fink’s successor for years – there is a lot to consider and clearly, gigantic shoes to fill.
Succession for the most senior roles is always challenging. But when the incumbent is iconic, long standing, highly respected and with a unique set of skills and attributes, it can be an impossible task.
Could AI help? And if so, how?
The most senior roles are often defined by the individual in post and not by the role description. That makes it hard to see how you might “replace” them. The answer is: you don’t. AI gives us the opportunity to evolve how we approach things and expand our thinking. When faced with the task of finding successors for senior roles, the path forward combines an ability to first align senior stakeholders around a set of critical questions, and to answer those questions with as much data and objectivity as possible.
Aligning stakeholders around the future profile for such a critical role is, in my view, not something that can be delegated to AI. The following questions should be considered and answered by the board, often with expert support and facilitation.
- What is the role there to achieve?
- What will success for this role look like in 2, 3, 5 years?
- What skills, experience, attributes are most likely to make that happen?
- What about the wider team – how does this new hire need to work with them and vice versa?
Where incumbents are iconic and with a unique set of skills and/or the business has changed/is changing, it could be the time to shape roles differently. For example, considering having more than one person delivering certain outcomes, and rather than an overarching leader whose focus was on coordinating a larger number of specialists. Or the business restructured into a set of divisions enabling the development of key skill sets in a more focused environment.
What AI IS good at, is assimilating and analysing vast quantities of data in response to specific queries. In the case of Blackrock’s future leadership, once the board distils the answers to the above and defines the next generation CEO profile and possible consequences for other exco roles, AI, for example our platform MapX, can help understand the size and make-up of populations for specific combinations of attributes and therefore provide a useful input as to whether or not certain strategies for hiring and ideal profiles are achievable.
I am not suggesting for one moment that Blackrock ask ChatGPT for who should succeed Mr Fink! But as an example of the challenge of replacing seemingly irreplaceable leaders, and the potential role of AI, it is quite an interesting case study.
At Savannah Group we have spent the last 3 years building our bespoke tool kit to help us understand the evolving options for leadership. From modest scale SMEs to the largest companies in the world, we help shape the questions that boards and leadership teams should answer to diagnose and design the next generation of leadership for their organisations. AI can have a role to bring additional data & analytics into the discussion which is helping our clients look round corners and be ready for the future. Contact us for more information.
Find out more about mapping and succession for in-demand leadership skill sets https://savannah-group.com/what-we-do/services/talent-intelligence/
