Succession Planning for Security Departments

Survival of the fittest may work in the animal kingdom, but grooming the next generation of CSOs requires a substantial investment of time, a sincere interest in employee development and a dash of humility. Are you ready for succession planning?

Communication skills are critical to a CSO and will only become more important as the security function grows in prominence. Wipprecht agrees that a CSO candidate must have the right technical skills. But getting to the top also requires people skillsespecially the ability to communicate with management. "You've got to expose your future talents to management," says Wipprecht. "Management has to get to know you on a personal basis," he says.

Moore goes a step further, encouraging his top security managers to interact regularly with senior executives to eliminate some of the natural deference to seniority that often exists. "You have to move outside your comfort zones in order to prepare for those big steps."

Ensuring that their top performers get business and management exposure can also give CSOs valuable insight into their abilities. Moore gets feedback from the line-of-business clients and stakeholders with whom his people interact twice a year. He feeds information about their strengths and weaknesses back into the succession planning funnel to determine their progress and the areas where they may need improvement.

Giving employees global exposure is also critical. Merck is part of the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C-TPAT), a joint initiative between the U.S. government and businesses to protect the security of cargo entering the United States. And with far-flung operations around the world, it's important that Merck's security executives have a global perspective. To that end, Moore is sending three global staff members to Europe, along with a senior security executive, to work on C-TPAT compliance issues. Aside from the project work, his other motives are to give these employees some valuable experience, and to see how these three individuals will fare. "I'll get an assessment of who adapted better to working in a non-U.S. environment and how they dealt with jet lag, language issues, the vagaries of international travel and business. You have to do these things to give them a 360-degree view of the world and the company. They won't get that unless they get out there and mix with other regions and people."

Establishing mentoring and coaching relationships is another way to build employee skill sets, whether you are setting security managers up with executive coaches or with each other. Barton suggests a practice that he calls "talent networking," where high-performing employees identify two skills that they feel are their strengths and two that could use further development. High-performers are then matched up by complementary strengths and weaknesses to create mentoring relationships that enable them to grow in the areas they need to while leveraging their own expertise to help someone else.