Steve Wolever is always
on the lookout for stars,
those people who shine and who have the potential to
one day run his business.
“What’s really driven succession planning home is this
baby boom, because all these
people are going to be leaving
the work force, and who’s
going to take their place?” says
Wolever, owner, president and
CEO of Signature Inc., which
does business as Signature
Worldwide.
Wolever, whose company
provides training to service-based organizations, says
Signature Worldwide’s succession program identifies top
performers and helps them
move up the ranks. Its U.S.
operations and seven licensees
reported $14.5 million in 2007
revenue.
Smart Business spoke with
Wolever about how he finds
the stars among his 300-plus
employees.
Q. How can CEOs prepare for
succession planning?
We’ve literally looked for our
stars, and we try to identify
them: What career path do
they have, and if someone
would leave, who is the next
likely person? It’s OK to say,
‘Our next likely person is
going to come from outside
because we don’t have anybody,’ but you need to know
that.
It really is planning, and
that’s something you can’t just
leave to HR. The key senior
management people need to
be involved in succession
planning because that’s the
strategic part of the future of
your company.
Q. How do you identify the
stars?
We have a committee that
includes our director of HR, our
CFO, my wife [Becky Wolever,
chief operating officer,] and I.
We set a time once a year with
each one of the department
heads, and they name two or
three people in their departments that they consider their
stars and explain to us why.
It gets that department head
thinking about who they would
have as a succession for themselves and who is showing extra
talent or energy within
their job that would be
considered a star.
We ask them this question: If this was your
business and you could
only take two people
from your department
with you to start it, which
two would you take and
why? That has brought
on some very interesting
rethinking of who they
thought were their stars.
Early on, when we
asked the question about
who they would take
with them, when the
department heads were
in the room with us, they
really stopped and
thought and changed
their mind.
Too often in companies, people get promoted because they
do their jobs very well, and they
might get put into a supervisory
role; they were good workers,
but they’re horrible supervisors.
That’s not fair to them, either.
Some people do a lot of work
and get a lot of things done, but
they’re not necessarily the stars.
You need a whole bunch of
those worker bees that do great
work and love their job, but
they might not have the desire to go any further that. It’s not
just about whether they do
their jobs really well; that’s not
the definition of a star in our
company.
Our definition is a person who
does good work but also has an
aptitude and a desire to move,
in most cases, into a higher
position.
