Corporate Impact on Leadership Succession

Executive Perspective

The private sector is all over leadership succession planning. Most governing boards of privately held or publicly traded companies require the CEO to develop a succession plan for the CEO and all senior positions in the company.

For-profit corporations in America recognize the importance of leadership, not just through the financial rewards bestowed upon the leaders, but also by ensuring that the leadership pipeline is robust. In the event of a gap in leadership, either deliberate or accidental, the gap is minimized by having someone ready to fill it. Admittedly, this can create awkward situations between the CEO and whoever has been designated as the heir apparent.
In most cases, the CEO is secure enough not to be concerned, unless the business is not doing well and then he or she begins to look over a shoulder.

Rare Preparation

AASA recently was funded by The Wallace Foundation to do a succession planning study in 700 of the nation’s largest urban school systems. The results show that, unlike the private sector, succession planning is rare in public education. Only about 10 percent of the districts surveyed indicated any form of succession planning, and about half of those indicated having promising practices worthy of additional study. I am proud to report that one of those districts is Fairfax County, Va., where I served as superintendent at the time that we implemented our succession plan.

In addition to Fairfax, District 4J in Eugene, Ore., under the leadership of Sheldon Berman, was identified, as were Fort Smith, Ark., with Superintendent Benny Gooden (an AASA past president) and High School District 214 in Arlington Heights, Ill., with David Schuler (current AASA president). These districts were identified as exemplars and became the subject of further investigation to look for the essential elements of leadership succession employed by the districts.
Notably, though, none of these districts focused on the planning for succession involving the superintendent. In all cases, the succession planning dealt with personnel at the assistant principal, principal and district administrator levels.

There may well be others, but the only district that I am aware of that has a school board policy dealing with superintendent succession planning is Farmington Public Schools in Farmington, Mich. In that policy, the superintendent recommends who would be the acting superintendent in the event of an emergency or temporary absence.

Farmington’s policy also details what the procedure would be for a permanent leadership change, including the roles of the acting superintendent that can evolve into an interim superintendent position, and the search process that would result in the appointment of the new superintendent. Unlike a corporate succession plan, the succession plan does not include the naming of the individual who would assume the superintendency in the event of the departure of the sitting superintendent.

Stakeholder Say

Unlike the private sector, where the corporate board can move quickly to replace the CEO with the backup named in the succession plan, it would be difficult for a board of education to act in that manner. We know in most communities the stakeholders want a say in the naming of the next superintendent. Even when a likely successor exists, school boards feel obliged to undertake a formal search to assure the community it has considered other candidates and has concluded no one out there is better than the homegrown product.

Consequently, school district succession planning tends to focus on positions below the superintendent level. In the four districts involved in The Wallace Foundation study, the impetus for a plan resulted from forecasts indicating the widespread retirements of sitting administrators, primarily principals. In Fairfax, we faced the loss, mostly due to retirements, of approximately 70 percent of our 300 system leaders, which included principals, assistants and district-level administrators. With the help of a grant from Wallace, we implemented a program called LEAD Fairfax.

The program was designed to take teacher leaders out of the classroom and train them to assume assistant principal positions. Assistant principals were trained to assume principalships and principals were trained for central-office positions or to be mentors and coaches for newly appointed principals. LEAD participants were chosen from schools where 25 percent of the student population was in poverty to improve and enhance leadership in high-needs schools.

The results of the program were outstanding, and the goal of replacing retiring administrators with LEAD participants was met. You can read the full report at http://www.aasa.org/uploadedFiles/Resources/Leadership_Development/Leadership-Succession-Planning-Executive%20Summary.pdf.

@AASADan