A big Do: Do prepare for a deep, long, constructive engagement.

• Author: Tichy, Noel M.
• Position: Column

"There's one board I can think of, which I sit on," Bob Knowling recalled, "where in all modesty we were really, totally on our game." He spelled out for me what they did right in seven easy steps:

1. We all agreed, right off the hat, that this was our most important job.

2. We conducted in-depth succession reviews biannually, looking deep inside the organization.

3. We carved out enough time to do it right, because we knew from experience that's what it takes.

4. We went through the internal candidates at the direct CEO report level but also dug deeper, a level or two down, to understand where the talent really was inside the organization. We wanted visibility and we got it.

5. We benchmarked internal candidates with external ones, because we believed we'd be better positioned to understand the development needs of the internal candidates if we kept our eye on the external comparison. We retained a search firm and we did an external comparative scan on them all.

6. We created aggressive plans to expose any candidate who had not yet achieved but clearly possessed CEO potential to the three or four things we decided...