Succession planning for boards

An emergency plan

• Name who leads the school if the Head is suddenly unavailable, and for how long.
• Keep the plan short, current, and known to the executive committee.
• Say who tells the faculty, the families and the press, and in what order.
• Record where the board can find what it would need at short notice: the Head's contract, banking authorities, insurance, key relationships.
• Review it once a year at the same meeting each year, so nobody has to remember to raise it.
• Make sure the named deputy knows they are named, and has agreed.

The first two weeks after an unexpected departure

A planned-transition plan

• Talk with the Head each year about their horizon, so a departure is never a surprise.
• Review the Head's role and the school's strategic priorities, so the board knows what the next leader must be able to do.
• Build the budget for a search and a transition year before it is needed.
• Keep the Head's evaluation current. A board that has not evaluated its Head in three years is poorly placed to describe what the next one should be.
• Agree what the board owes a departing Head: notice, announcement, and a dignified exit. Candidates watch how the last Head was treated.

The annual conversation with the Head

• Ask it the same way every year, so it is a routine rather than a signal: what is your horizon, and what would make you stay longer?
• Ask what would have to be true for the next five years to be the best of their career here.
• Ask what they would want their successor to inherit, and what they would want fixed before then.
• Treat the answers as confidential to the chair and the executive committee, and act on them in the budget.

Develop internal leaders

• Strong internal candidates come from deliberate development: stretch assignments, board exposure and coaching.
• Give senior administrators exposure to the board before a search, not during one, so the board is judging work rather than a performance.
• Fund the development honestly. A division head who has never built a budget or sat with a major donor is not being prepared, whatever the title says.
• Be honest early with an internal candidate who is not ready. Letting someone discover it in a finalist round costs the school a good administrator as well as a candidate.

Handling an internal candidacy well

• Decide and announce the rules before applications open: whether internal candidates are welcome, and how they will be evaluated.
• Use the same process and the same criteria. A shortcut for an internal candidate undermines them if they are appointed.
• Agree who on the committee the internal candidate reports to, and take that person out of the room for those conversations.
• Plan for both outcomes, including how the school keeps a valued administrator who was not chosen.
• Tell them the outcome before the community hears it, in person, from the chair.

What the board should keep on file

• The current contract and any side letters, where the chair can find them in an evening.
• The last three Head evaluations and the goals they were set against.
• The emergency plan, dated, with the named deputy's agreement.
• A current statement of what the school needs from its leadership, reviewed whenever the strategic plan is.