A Novel Approach to Leadership Succession Management (63H)

Like any form of advance planning, succession management (or succession planning) is vital to the long-term health and sustainability of an organization. It is a way to build a leadership pipeline and help individuals grow through targeted development plans, thus boosting loyalty and retention as well as individual and collective morale. Ballad Health undertook a succession management program in 2022 to enhance leaders' professional development and, hopefully, commitment to the organization. What soon became apparent was that these leaders needed more than professional growth—they needed personal guidance and support. Many were burned out, with low morale and tempered enthusiasm for their work. There was a lack of esprit de corps and leadership team unity which affected Ballad's culture. Ballad leadership, especially its COO and CHRO, realized that a traditional form of succession planning based on standard individual development plans would be inadequate to address the root causes of their retention challenge and the larger issues plaguing the leadership team. Working with their leadership talent partners at CMA and WittKieffer, they fashioned a program to provide personal assessment, reflection, advising and coaching to the entire senior leadership team.

It was a rousing success—executives praised it both for its personal and professional benefits, which led Ballad to extend the program to another cohort of leaders, then another. Today, more than 150 executives at different levels of the Ballad organization have gone through what is now called the B Kinetic program, a comprehensive effort to support executives in their personal and professional needs. This session will present the work at Ballad Health as a case study, exploring what challenges Ballad faced, key decisions it made along the way, lessons it learned and best practices other organizations can adopt. Audience engagement and questioning will be encouraged. The ultimate goal of the session is to provide insight to other organizations who may struggle with executive retention, loyalty and morale and are looking for a creative model to apply to their own situation.