One of the most overlooked areas among businesses and organisations in general is succession planning.
It is arguable, as some commentators have suggested, that the challenges faced by the ruling party are largely attributable to poor management of this issue. Ranjeni Moonsamy, writing in a recent edition of Times Live notes: ‘Realising the same people will be returning to run things is frankly depressing’.
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New leadership
The nurturing and support of new talent is a fundamental competency that is not exclusive to just the top positions in an organisation. The appointment of Tito Mboweni as the new finance minister, while lauded as stabilising choice in many quarters, also underlined the ANC’s failure to grasp the challenge of new leadership.
In family founded and run companies, the point at which the interests of the founders and often majority shareholders, and those of the company clash can often make or break it. Pick and Pay for example, waited too long in the view of some analysts, in bringing new top management into the company at the expense of family members. The appointment of a seasoned retailer as CEO five years ago has seen a massive turnaround in the performance of the company.
All organisations, whatever their size or nature, need to make succession planning a key part of their strategic considerations.
Some of the risks of poor succession planning include:
The organisation becoming identified too closely with an individual
A lack of dynamism and progress arising from entrenched leadership
The size and complexity of managing the entity is beyond the abilities of incumbent leadership
Reduced accountability and transparency in managing the organisation.
After matriculating, Vijay Naidoo studied Economics in the UK. Upon his return, hejoined the family construction business as MD for 10 years.
He subsequently joined his sister in their furniture manufacturing business as director for quality assurance and operations. He was responsible for all quality aspects of their products, and led the project to the business achieving an ISO 9000 quality accreditation. As an export focused business, this was important for our international competitiveness.
Mr Naidoo has an abiding interest in quality management and productivity improvement, particularly in manufacturing.
More recently, he has focused a lot of his time on giving back to the community by way of mentorship of small businesses and sitting on the executive of the South Coast Chamber of Commerce. He also sits on the Board of the Ugu South Coast Development Agency.
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