As Kaplan Partners celebrates our 30th anniversary this year, I’ve been contemplating how best to mark this milestone. It is hard to fathom how our firm has grown and evolved from those early days when the business launched in the second bedroom of our townhouse in downtown Philadelphia. We’ve learned and seen a lot since then, so I thought that I would share some of the most critical lessons we’ve learned about leadership and governance over the past three decades. There is no doubt that the business environment will remain challenging for the foreseeable future. However, I have observed that the most successful organizations over time — regardless of industry — are those whose boards, CEO and senior leaders place the highest value on human capital across their institution. Here are five areas where our lessons learned may be worth pondering for the future: 1. Talent Matters: Everyone knows the old saying, “People are our most important asset.” Yet, given today’s workforce dynamics, historically low unemployment and demographic challenges, the issues of employee attraction, development and retention need to be taken to another level. Boards and CEOs should be questioning their chief human resources officers about their plans to tackle these challenges, and CEOs need to take the lead on people issues. If your human resources leaders are not bringing strategic thinking to the human capital arena, it may be time to revisit this area, as talent management is not going to get any easier in the years ahead. The variable on plan execution always comes down to talent. 2. CEO Succession: The decision of organizational leadership is a board’s most important responsibility. Yet many boards do not emphasize this adequately, often allowing a long-tenured and well-liked CEO to dodge the questions of succession or their own retirement plans. For a firm with viable internal CEO successors, the lack of a planned succession timeline can breed extreme frustration for internal contenders, perhaps even causing some to depart for a perceived better opportunity. In addition, many boards also have little real experience navigating the challenges and dynamics of leadership succession and may benefit from outside assistance of some sort for this most important decision. 3. Board Performance: Boards today will benefit from taking a closer look at how they operate, what topics they mainly discuss and how everyone behaves in the boardroom. As Bill McNabb, former chairman & CEO of Vanguard, has emphasized, most boards acknowledge that they would like to spend more time on key subjects such as talent, strategy and risk. The need for boards to add more strategic thinking, business sophistication, By Alan J. Kaplan, Founder and CEO, Kaplan Partners LESSONS LEARNED OVER 30 YEARS 12 The CommunityBanker
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