CEO succession planning is a critical board responsibility — and a big challenge. According to Dr. Julie Bell, director, leadership advisory at Chartwell Partners, boards can follow a five-step process to ensure an orderly, informed succession planning process. That process includes nailing down a timeline, evaluating the candidates and coming up with a coaching plan to close any skills gaps in a would-be successor.
David Findlay didn’t set out to become a banker.
After earning a degree in history from DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, Chicago-based Northern Trust Corp. hired Findlay as a commercial banker in the mid-1980s. He didn’t take accounting or finance courses in college, and says that he struggled through the company’s training program. At his 90-day review, he was put on probation. Findlay persevered, he adds, because “Northern, where I spent the first 11 years of my career, was an organization much like ours that says, ‘We’re here to help people succeed.’”
Findlay’s gone far since those early struggles: Today, he leads $6 billion Lakeland Financial Corp., in Warsaw, Indiana. Year after year, it’s one of the most successful banks in the country, according to Bank Director’s RankingBanking analysis, consistently ranking among the top 25 public banks in the U.S.
The reflections on his 38-year career — including his years at Northern Trust — inform a leadership course he teaches at Lake City University, a training program for the company’s subsidiary, Lake City Bank. Any employee can take the class — or any of the classes taught by Lakeland’s executives and leaders. On average, employees participate in these in-person training classes five or six times annually.
Focusing on his past can be a humbling experience, he says. “Teaching this course helps keep me grounded, to remind me of the challenges that I’ve had during my career,” says Findlay. “It’s sharing our own personal successes and failures — and the failures [are] as important as anything to show that you can work through them and have a career path that you can be proud of when it’s all said and done.”
If that sounds hands-on, that’s just an indicator of Findlay’s leadership style. In previous reporting, executives described him to me as a CEO that values direct connection with the bank’s employees and clients. He’s also developed a flat organizational hierarchy where decisions aren’t concentrated in one individual. Put simply, he trusts his bankers.
“An organization that places too much emphasis on one decision maker or a small group of decision makers, I think finds it very hard to move forward and be as progressive as an organization as you need to be. People think of banking as a pretty slow-moving, boring business. But it’s a pretty dynamic business,” he explains. “We love to tell our investors that we’re an execution-oriented organization. … We gather information, we assess the circumstances, we make decisions, and then we go, and obviously that’s contributed some long-term, consistent success for the bank.”
In this edition of The Slant podcast, Findlay also shares his views on how commercial banking has evolved, the impact of technology on relationship building, whether it’s harder to be a CEO in today’s environment and his views on the year ahead. He’s looking for a return to normal, he says. Lake City Bank doesn’t rely on M&A to grow; it focuses on growing its customer base and taking market share from competitors. That slowed in the pandemic.
“We lost that momentum of market share take,” Findlay explains. But he expects business development to pick up. “[It’s what] I’m looking forward to the most; that’s the idea that we are back out calling on our prospects, developing those opportunities.”
In late January 2023, Findlay will participate in a panel discussion at Bank Director’s Acquire or Be Acquired conference that shares perspectives from the leaders of three top performing banks in the RankingBanking study.
This episode, and all past episodes of The Slant Podcast, are available on Bank Director.com, Spotify and Apple Music.
The chief executive officer is usually the single most important person in any organization, but it’s a job that most individuals grow into over time. The transition is often filled with challenges and difficult learning experiences.
Such was the case for Ira Robbins, the chairman and CEO at Valley National Bancorp, a $54 billion regional bank headquartered in Wayne, New Jersey. The 48-year-old Robbins was just 43 when he succeeded long-time CEO Gerald Lipkin in 2018. Lipkin, on the other hand, was closing in on his 77th birthday when he passed the baton to Robbins after running the bank for 42 years.
Robbins is deeply respectful of Lipkin but shares that one immediate challenge he faced was changing a culture that hadn’t kept pace with the bank’s growth over the years. He said Valley National was a $20 billion bank that operated as if it was still a $5 billion bank. Changing that culture was not easy, and he had to make some very difficult personnel decisions along the way.
Robbins is thoughtful, introspective and candid about his growth into the CEO role at Valley National. His reflections should be of great interest to any banker who hopes to someday become a CEO.
This episode, and all past episodes of The Slant Podcast, are available on Bank Director, Spotify and Apple Music.
The financial services industry is facing a substantial succession bubble, with an expected 50% board and senior management turnover by 2025, driven by generational and business model changes. In addition, the recent pandemic accelerated the baby boomer generation to exit more rapidly than predicted prior to the pandemic.
Most experts agree: The high demand for senior leadership talent will continue into the foreseeable future. In the face of a highly competitive talent cycle, coupled with many banks increasing in business complexity, does your institution have confidence in the current board and senior leadership composition to guide your organization through the next five years?
Over the years, the Chartwell Partners’ Financial Services Team has helped clients evaluate their board and senior leadership team against the strategic plans for the bank to help our clients make confident leadership decisions. We have successfully used a four-step process we find effective that includes:
Step 1: Intake
Engage a third party or appoint a director to lead the planning. Meet with key stakeholders, such as the chair, lead director or CEO to understand the business strategic objectives, the current leadership dynamic and unique cultural elements that drive effective leadership transition plans. The ultimate goal is to align leadership decisions to the future business objectives.
Step 2: Planning
Create a tailored plan to define outcomes, outlining defined action plans and a timeline. In our case, we work with the decision-making team to provide guidance on executing against the defined plan — whether it’s testing a current succession plan or executing internal leadership assessments and processes to provide leadership insight supporting board or management changes.
Step 3: Assessment
Leveraging in-person executive assessments, coupled with data-driven online assessment service, the point person should meet with the select executives and provide in-depth insights into the leadership team. They can also provide perspective on the leadership team compared to outside executive options to provide the decision makers a thorough leadership analysis.
Step 4: Reporting
Following assessment, the project lead should produce a report based on the desired outcomes defined by the decision team, which may include a well-defined succession plan or a guide to an internal leadership selection process. Reports should be tailored to the specific needs of the bank, so key stakeholders can be confident in the executive leadership decisions.
At the conclusion of the four steps, it is important to communicate the plans with the team and instill board confidence in the organization. In addition, it is critical to consistently evaluate the leaders against the strategic plan and ensure they are growing and developing leaders the organization can follow. Ultimately, the board owns the responsibility for the CEO and holds them accountable for the development of their team; however, it is always important the designated committee of the board be in touch with management team succession planning. Effective succession planning takes intentional focus from the board. Banks that are proactive about succession planning increase the likelihood of a successful outcome transitioning boards and management teams.
When David Findlay was appointed president and chief executive officer at Lakeland Financial Corp. in 2014 to replace Michael Kubacki, it was the culmination of a long succession process that began in 2000 when he joined the Warsaw, Indiana-based bank as its chief financial officer. Kubacki knew Findlay, having worked with him previously at the Northern Trust Co. in Chicago, and he recruited him to Lakeland.
The bank needed a CFO, but Kubacki had something else in mind as well.
“He was a high-powered person and not only were we going to get a good CFO, we were going to get a succession plan over the long term,” says Kubacki, who remains chairman. “The strengths that he brought from a leadership potential standpoint — it was anticipated that he would eventually become the CEO. That [plan] was hatched right from the get-go.”
Findlay was promoted to president in 2010, and later began spending extra one-on-one time with individual board members in more informal settings so they could get to know him better personally. Kubacki was 63 when the board decided that Findlay was ready to become CEO; he became executive chairman for two years before eventually becoming the board’s independent chair.
Kubacki will leave the Lakeland board in 2023 when he reaches the mandatory retirement age for directors of 72. As for Findlay, he turned out to be a pretty good choice as CEO. With assets of $6 billion, Lakeland was the fifth-ranked bank on Bank Director’s 2020 Bank Performance Scorecard, a ranking of the 300 largest publicly traded U.S. banks.
CEO succession doesn’t always go as smoothly as it did at Lakeland, where a promising young executive was given time to grow into the job. If a bank doesn’t have an internal candidate to succeed a soon-to-retire CEO, then it will have to recruit one from the outside. Whichever way it goes, there is no question that managing an orderly succession process is a core responsibility of the board.
“CEO succession absolutely, unequivocally, is the No. 1 responsibility of the board of directors,” says Alan Kaplan, CEO and founder of Kaplan Partners, an executive search firm in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania. “Public company, private bank or mutual – doesn’t matter. CEO succession is a process that needs to be owned by the board and specifically, by the independent directors.”
One of the most critical elements in any CEO succession process is time. Ideally, planning for a transfer of power at the most critical position in the company should begin years in advance. Say a bank CEO reaches the age of 64 and announces to his or her board that they want to retire in a year. If succession planning hasn’t begun, it forces the board to accelerate a process that ideally should proceed at a thoughtful and deliberate pace.
“Most institutions are pretty poor at executing successful CEO succession plans,” says J. Scott Petty, a partner in the Dallas office of the executive search firm Chartwell Partners. Sometimes the problem begins with a CEO who won’t commit to a firm retirement date, which can delay the process. “The better plan would be to have an age when the CEO will agree to step down, and then be very intentional three to five years before and identify that next generation person and give them the rotational responsibilities to prepare them to be able to step into that role,” Petty says.
Most boards have a strong preference for internal candidates, because bringing in a new CEO from the outside can be extremely disruptive to a bank’s culture. But while an internal successor might be the most comfortable choice, they may lack the skills or experience necessary to help the bank grow. So, another important element in every CEO succession plan is picking someone who not only will be good for today but can help the bank achieve its strategic objectives over the next five to 10 years. “I think there’s always a preference to continue the culture of the bank by selecting someone from the inside,” Petty says. “But often times the person they thought would be right to take the bank to the next level, they realize they’re not and there’s a gap there.”
Both Kaplan and Petty say it’s often useful for boards to bring in an outside search firm to perform an assessment of their internal candidates, focusing not only on their readiness to become CEO but also on whether they are the best person to execute the bank’s long range strategic plan. “A lot of times, boards don’t have context on executives,” Kaplan says. “They may know them in the community, they may socialize with them, they may see them in the boardroom. But they don’t actually know what they’re like to work for and work with.”
Kaplan says that “a painless, bloodless, smooth transition of power internally is always preferable, providing that person is really qualified and ready based on where the company is going. Organizations that can plan ahead and develop people that seem to have leadership competencies … I think that is an ideal way to go.” Kaplan says his firm’s “three-year stick rate” for CEO and C-suite executives recruited from the outside is 97%. Still, “companies with long-term, well-groomed internal contenders on average outperform parachuting somebody in from the outside.”
Kaplan believes strongly that the CEO succession process should be guided by the board’s independent directors. The incumbent CEO can play an important role but should not be the kingmaker. “You would always want them to be a participant in the succession process because they’re your most experienced banker,” Kaplan says. “What I think is to be avoided whenever possible is that the [CEO] is driving the process.”
Ultimately, the choice of a new CEO should be a board decision.
There are many ways that bank boards can organize themselves to manage a CEO succession process. “In some cases, the nominating and governance committee acts as the succession committee,” Kaplan says. “In some cases, it’s the compensation committee because HR matters fall there. In some cases, we see boards form a special committee. Oftentimes, that committee is comprised of what I would call your most capable board members or your board members who really understand these kinds of issues.”
Every CEO search is a little different, reflecting the culture and practices of the board as well as the personalities of the people involved. The succession process at Lakeland worked as well as it did because Kubacki and Findlay had a personal relationship, and the younger executive was willing to be patient. “I think we were very fortunate we had David — that we had him so long and it was just very seamless,” Kubacki says. “Can every organization say they’re going to recruit a person and that person is going to wait 14 years to be CEO? It worked for us, but David is a special guy.”
CEO succession planning should be a top priority for a bank’s board of directors, but many institutions lack a plan. J. Scott Petty of Chartwell Partners outlines how to prepare for the short and long-term transition of the CEO and addresses recruiting new board talent.
When Citigroup’s chairman Mike O’Neill spoke on an investor conference call about the abrupt resignation of CEO Vikram Pandit, he said that the timing made sense because strategic planning was underway.
“And so, if we are going to hold [the new CEO] accountable for our performance, he clearly needs to have a role in setting the targets,’’ O’Neill said.
Citigroup Inc. has had a bad year. Make that a bad decade. The company’s stock price fell 89 percent during Pandit’s tenure. But the bank is hardly alone. Many of the more than 7,000 banks and thrifts in the country have problems of their own, so the question of whether you have the right CEO on the job, and if not, how to get rid of him or her, is one that many banks are trying to answer.
Courage is step one. Is the board independent enough from management to actually fire the CEO?
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the “shake-up amounts to an extraordinary flexing of boardroom muscle at Citigroup, a company that until recently had a board stocked with directors handpicked by former CEO Sanford Weill who rarely challenged management decisions.”
Chairman O’Neill, a longtime banker and stellar CEO at the Bank of Hawaii, has only been there since April. Several other directors are recent appointees who signed on after regulators urged a board purge following the financial crisis, according to the Journal.
In fact, O’Neill had an office within 100 feet of Pandit, according to The New York Times. In his new job as chairman, O’Neill quickly got to work learning in the ins and outs of Citigroup and visiting the company’s various trading floors, according to news reports.
“The chairman of the board is critical,’’ says James McAlpin, a strategic planning expert and bank attorney at Bryan Cave LLP in Atlanta. “If you have the chairman and the CEO as the same person, that further complicates this. That makes it more difficult for the evaluation [of the CEO’s performance] to take place.”
If the board doesn’t want a non-executive chairman, a lead independent director who meets separately with other independent directors is key to maintaining independence.
It’s also important that the CEO be judged on how well he or she has executed the strategic plan. Tying the CEO’s performance to strategic goals with a formal annual evaluation is something that bank boards often don’t do.
As shocking as this might sound, banks are more likely to evaluate the performance of their tellers than their CEOs.
“There are a surprising number of banks where the CEO doesn’t see a performance review,’’ McAlpin says. “Particularly in community banks, it’s the exception rather than the rule. That makes it harder for the CEO to know how he is doing. Concern builds over time and suddenly the CEO finds himself in a very confrontational meeting with the board.”
Geri Forehand, national director of strategic services with Sheshunoff Consulting + Services, says that all CEOs should receive an annual performance review.
“When you hire a CEO, you have to have a way to evaluate the CEO, both quantitatively and qualitatively,’’ he says. “Every board should handle this in a formal matter. You should give your CEO an evaluation on an annual basis.”
He says the CEO should be fully informed of the metrics that will be used to measure performance and how they will be used, including how the board will factor in qualitative measures.
“I think the CEO wants to know what is expected of him or her,’’ Forehand says.
It’s not only good for the CEO, it’s good for the bank. A CEO who knows what he or she is supposed to achieve will be better able to actually achieve it.
When it’s time to make a tough decision, however, it works best for there to be a strong chairman or lead independent director. The full board needs to be involved in the discussions and the CEO needs to know the entire board has made a decision.
The board should also go through the process of identifying the next CEO far in advance of an actual resignation, which will make the transition easier, says Forehand.
The actual firing (or forced resignation), therefore, is part of a long, strategic process.
“It’s a very difficult conversation to have with a CEO,’’ McAlpin says. “[The CEO] wants to know the entire board has deliberated on this.”
Succession planning is an often overlooked issue for community bank boards, whose agendas are stuffed with business decisions and regulatory requirements. However, good succession planning can avoid many problems in the future, and attorney Thomas Hutton of the law firm Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton talks about the right ways to go about it.
What do you mean by succession planning?
Succession planning has to be looked at as preparation for change in leadership, whether it’s at the CEO level or any C-suite job. It could be an announced retirement or an unplanned situation, such as a death or disability or an unexpected termination of employment. It can also relate to a temporary leave of absence, maybe for medical reasons, for example.
How many boards do you work with that don’t have a formal succession plan?
There are a lot of boards that don’t have a formal succession plan or are really not up to speed on how to properly handle succession planning. Turnover at community banks tends to be relatively low. There are a lot of long-serving CEOs and CFOs, so boards can become somewhat complacent. They can think, ‘If a previous retirement went well, that means the next one will be without any issues, as well.’ They don’t really think about how situations can change, especially unexpected situations such as regulatory orders or a death or disability.
Succession planning comes up less frequently than a lot of other matters, like determining compensation on an annual basis. It’s very important to an organization, however. Addressing it too late or improperly may lead to a level of competition for a position that becomes unhealthy and may result in internal dissention or even unanticipated or unwanted departures. Maybe that “competition” would have been better to take place over a longer period of time. Or, the successor may need to be approved by regulators if the bank is operating under a regulatory order. If the board already has someone in mind, the process of getting regulatory approval can go quicker if the board can make a solid case for the desired successor. In short, it’s a process that should be discussed regularly.
Is there regulatory guidance that addresses the need for a succession plan?
Not necessarily. But regulators do consider adopting and reviewing a formal succession plan at least annually a best practice.
What is the role of the board in succession planning?
The board needs to develop a formal written policy that can evolve over time. It’s not just picking someone as a possible replacement; it includes understanding the process. By addressing it regularly, at least annually, they can avoid some of the problems that typically arise and eliminate or reduce the natural anxieties and uneasiness that comes with succession planning.
In today’s environment, it’s not just replacing someone with a qualified person; the bank might have regulatory issues that could make the requirements of the position different from a couple years ago. There should also be a process to address the situation of an identified replacement not being available or not meeting the bank’s current needs. A lot of thought should go into the succession plan. Just for starters, who will handle the succession planning process—the nominating committee, the compensation committee or a succession planning committee?
What kind of balance should there be between the CEO picking a successor versus the board?
In community banks, it’s pretty common for the CEO to have an expectation that he or she will have a big voice in identifying a successor. That’s fine. However, the board really needs to control the process and should rely on the CEO for input and not just “rubber stamp” the selection. The board needs to become familiar with the candidates over time and may invite individuals to make board presentations or appear at bank or industry functions as part of the long-term “interview” process.
Couldn’t identifying a successor lead other executives to leave?
Yes. If there’s a large gap in background and skills to the other executives, maybe it’s not as big a deal. But if there are several executives who have an interest in and are competing for a position, it may be problematic to specifically name someone too early. If the board is doing this as a long-term process, it will gain a better sense of who should be the replacement and can better handle how to address those who are not selected. However, the board should not automatically assume the no. 2 person wants to become the no. 1 person or is qualified at the time to become the no. 1 person. The no. 2 person may have little or no interest or lack the full complement of skills, depending on the timing and nature of the situation. In that case, it is important to identify who will fill the position temporarily—the chairman, a former CEO on the board or someone else.
At Isabella Bank headquartered in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, the officers are seasoned veterans with an average of approximately 20-plus years of experience at the $1.3-billion asset institution. Replacing individuals with that kind of experience when they retire is a difficult task, a fact which was not lost on Isabella Bank CEO Richard Barz, who sees his own retirement on the horizon.
“In about 2007, the human resources director and I met and we talked about succession planning down the road,” says Barz. “One of the things we realized is that we have to start acting now because we were going to have about seven of our senior people retiring in a ten year period—beginning in probably 2012 or 2013.”
Barz felt the best candidates to fulfill these positions would be found within, and fortunately, his board was in full agreement. The challenge was that as individuals were brought up into these senior positions within the organization, they would in turn be leaving openings that needed to be filled.
“There is a term they use out there called a virtual bench,” says Barz. “It’s continually changing. You can replace five or six positions, but you are also opening five or six positions. So you have to make sure the next five are ready to fill in their new roles well and so on. All of a sudden, you’ve got to think about fifteen people transitioning. You have to develop a virtual bench of people who are fulfilling those roles. You can’t just do it by doing an evaluation once or twice a year,” he says.
Barz and his team started taking a more proactive approach to succession management than in years past. They began by going through a select number of people they thought had the possibility of becoming CEO or president, as well as the people who would likely follow up the line due to backfilling. Then, they traced the qualities they were looking for in each of these positions, and instituted a program that would emphasize these traits during goal setting for the selected individuals.
They quickly realized that tackling this new program alone might not be the best strategy. “The problem is that we just didn’t have the time, or really the skill, to follow through and take this to the next level like we needed,” says Barz. “At that point, we decided we wanted to bring in a professional development firm whose sole responsibility is to assist the selected individuals in working on the specific skills they would need—basically we brought in a job coach for executive development.”
All candidates went through a two year training program to identify their strengths and develop the qualities they would need for their future positions—eight started the first year, and after seeing how successful the program was becoming, 10 started the next. Barz says the results were amazing. He saw the candidates’ confidence increase as well as their ability to work with others in the organization and create bonding relationships. “The whole concept was to have them work as a team,” says Barz.
The final step was to take the individuals who were going to be in the very top positions and have them work with a professional succession management firm. Barz enlisted the firm Heidrick & Struggles, who devised its own set of important skills and attributes from the firm’s previous experience, and then went through the top people to see how these individuals fit into these roles. The firm helped identify the strengths and opportunities for improvement of the future CEOs and presidents, which helped these individuals develop towards their eventual roles.
While this was a long and fairly complicated process, Barz feels it was certainly worth the investment. For one, Barz says the failure rate of CEOs who are outside hires is too high, especially when you consider what is at stake with shareholders and the future of your entire operation. Perhaps more importantly, all of this preparation takes away uncertainty and instills confidence in the organization. If a position opens up either through retirement or unexpected circumstance, the bank will be assured that the person filling that spot has the necessary skills and understands the culture.
When Barz retires as CEO, he knows the 370 employee bank will be in good hands even without him. “I’ve been asked to stay on the board, and if [the future executives] ask me for some advice I can give it to them. But in general, they probably won’t need it. The people we have filling these roles are experienced and skilled; it’s really going to be their bank and their corporation,” he says.
As boards seek to improve oversight of key elements of their companies, many directors would agree that they need to take a far more active oversight role in overall management succession, not just in CEO succession. The question is: how?
Taking the Lead
In the past, boards typically focused narrowly on chief executive officer succession, looking for the emergency replacement and among the direct reports to the CEO. They paid far less attention to succession in other C-level roles (CFO, CHRO) and almost none to learning more about high potentials, or good candidates, further down in the organization. Today, however, boards—especially bank boards—are expected to exercise far more oversight of the larger succession management process. In January 2012 already, we have seen federal bank regulators ask one of our bank clients for a better understanding of how the board was monitoring talent development and succession for several critical roles under the CEO.
Many boards are not just reacting to federal scrutiny, but are proactively increasing their oversight while taking care not to overstep governance boundaries. They want to ensure that the organization has adequately planned for contingencies regarding succession in particularly critical roles such as risk, finance and legal—often referred to as control leaders.
For example, in the past eighteen months, while working with boards on leadership and succession issues, I witnessed three instances in which a Fortune 500 board strongly urged the CEO to remove a senior executive. The case of one CFO is typical. He had performed well in the past; he was highly talented and the company was not in trouble, but not thriving. However, in looking at the company’s long-term strategy, the board reluctantly but firmly concluded that he did not have the right competencies to help take the company where it needed to go. The CEO concurred and, following careful planning and communications, he departed just over 90 days later.
Where to Start
For boards eager to get on top of the issue, the place to begin is with 360-degree evaluations of executives from the C-level down through the next two layers of management. The board should ask management to undertake a comprehensive assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of all of those executives. Whether conducted with internal resources or with external assistance, these evaluations should not simply be generic appraisals, but full assessments of each leader with multiple inputs and an in-depth assessment interview of each leader.
The executives should be evaluated against the requirements of their particular roles as well as in the context of the company’s long-term strategy and objectives. Do they have the skills, experiences and leadership behaviors that will be required to successfully execute against the strategy over the coming years? Less proactive boards, especially at troubled banks, may find themselves conducting such evaluations anyway. Increasingly, we have seen the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and state banking regulators request full assessments of executives (and in some cases directors) at banks with capital or loan exposure issues.
Supplement Evaluation with Exposure
Few people would deny that formal evaluation is an indispensable element in succession management at any level. But formal evaluations of executives beyond the CEO and heirs-apparent could be greatly enhanced through more direct exposure between company leaders and the directors.
However, boards are usually exposed to only a handful of top executives—the CEO of course, and usually the chief financial officer the head of human resources and the general counsel/corporate secretary. Contact with other executives is often limited for timing and other reasons. That’s unfortunate because directors are typically leaders whose success is based on their ability to judge top talent at first hand. Direct contact with high potentials would enable directors to exercise their judgment, bring evaluations to life, and take the measure of these executives as individuals and as leaders. There are a number of natural opportunities for these interactions, including:
All of these interactions are win-win. Directors gain an understanding of what is really taking place deep in the company’s talent pool, greater knowledge of the business and a multi-dimensional basis on which to judge talent and offer advice on managing it. High potential executives develop earlier in their careers the ability to work with the board.
Ask Yourself How Well You Really Know These Executives
It is of course unlikely that your board does none of the things being suggested here. The real question, however, is not how many of the boxes you may have checked. It is whether you are doing these things in a systematic, comprehensive way that yields substantive, multi-dimensional, and actionable knowledge of the company’s cadre of high potential leaders.
For example, consider the substance and multi-dimensionality of your knowledge with regard to key executives and risk management. Do you know the capabilities in risk management of each of those executives? Do you have some idea of each individual’s appetite for risk and how it fits with the bank’s strategy?
To gauge quality of your current ability to evaluate high potential executives, ask yourself these simple yes-or-no questions:
If you answered “no” to any of those questions, then it may be time for your board to adopt practices that provide more satisfying answers and better oversight.