Chapter 11: Business Sustainability During a Pandemic: Practical Steps to Succession Planning

The size of the economic fall-out from COVID 19 is still being assessed. As businesses—small and large—begin to regroup their employees who have been largely working remotely, they are still making calculations about when it is safe to return to work at the office. The impact on business was swift and uncalculated. Organizations were driven into unplanned change as employees scrambled to carry on business as usual, while almost nothing in the world was “as usual.”

As businesses begin to regroup, we are reflecting on some of the lessons learned from the pandemic. One of the lessons is that there should be a greater urgency to plan for business continuation should the key leaders in the organizations become incapacitated and not be able to lead. The need for active succession planning rises in importance as we review the statistics of those who were most severely affected by the pandemic—those age 60 and above which includes the senior leadership of several organizations.