A new entrepreneurial, emerging markets division with operations on three continents was acquired by a global financial services enterprise. The pre-existing senior team could remain in place for only two years after leadership by a CEO for twenty years. Organization-wide leadership competence and succession planning had never been developed or executed. With losses during the prior decade, additionally there was a need for a change in strategy. We had to build the leadership capability to launch a premiere banking organization in their focal countries in 3 years. In addition to facilitating the development of a new strategy, we had to develop a global leadership competency model, identify talent and experience levels within all leaders and develop global leadership competence. Then, we had to create and execute a succession plan to transition the entire executive team out of the organization while elevating managers on three levels into their next tier of leadership.
We successfully completed the project within the three years, working across the continents with a diverse group who saw themselves as individuals rather than a team. We utilized an inclusive process to create a competency model that was validated by individual leaders and created an approach and curricula with action-learning techniques to focus on actual business issues and outcomes. We identified roles and skills needed to achieve core organizational competencies and assessed leadership potential of current and future leaders against the needed roles and skills. Additionally, we identified pools of latent leadership talent and began exposing them to leadership roles. And, our mentorship program was successful in quickly transferring deep market and business knowledge by the existing leaders to their respective replacements.