Strategic Succession Planning: The Business Transfiguration Driver During Crisis Management Periods

ABSTRACT: As the modern business world is constantly evolving to exhibit changes, introducing disruptive crises and turbulences, succession planning becomes essential for creating a pool of future innovative business leaders that bolster the business’s seamless transfiguration and evolution from one stage of disruptive crisis management periods to the other. Unfortunately, questions on how businesses can accomplish that are saddled by gaps in most studies that do not examine the linkage between successful implementation of succession plans and improved crisis management. It is such a question that motivates the use of an integrative review in this study to evaluate how most successful multinational business corporations handle their leadership succession planning, as well as how such succession plans have been instrumental in improving effective response to crisis situations. Findings revealed that most multinational business corporations are strategic succession planners that invest enormously in the development and nurturing of their future business leaders. In that process, carefully planned and executed succession planning is essential for influencing the evolution and transition of legendary historical businesses from one disruptive season to the other. Behind the adopted innovative strategies churning out an array of new products that bolster a firm’s adaptation to the evolving new trends is the committed, internally developed and groomed business leaders. During crisis situations, it is these leaders, and not the externally recruited CEOs, who are instrumental in reading the situation and applying the accurate strategies that aid the transfiguration of the business from one century to the other. In effect, successful implementation of succession plans creates a pool of competent future business leaders who emerge as inventors of unique crisis management solutions, enhancers of seamless business transfiguration and evolution, as well as enhancers of better business understanding and crisis response. From these findings, the study enriches the existing leadership theories by highlighting succession planning as essential for preparing business leaders that bolster the effectiveness of disruptive crisis management.