How to Choose Your Successor: Lessons from the Trenches

Three years ago APEX Public Relations CEO Pat McNamara was at a career crossroad. After 10 years of building and leading a multiple award-winning company, she felt that it was time to take a step back and thoroughly examine her options.

From the start, McNamara chose not to make her business all about her and had always made a point to develop a strong leadership team, in case she wanted to take some time away from the business. While the NDP leadership race continues to heat up. McNamara is calm, cool and collected. Her forward thinking has paid off. She recently handed over the CEO title to APEX President, Linda Andross, but she still enjoys hanging around the office.

Q: When did you start thinking about finding your successor?
A: It was always on my mind. I got pretty serious about it about three years before I had did it. I actually was working with a [business] coach to help me through the process..

Q: What kind of insights did your coach give you?
A: She was very good at helping me get focused. Basically, she would take me through things like what kind of person should I be looking at; should I take an internal person or external person; should I sell the company, and what am I going to do with my life after I do this? She was asking me those hard questions to get me to figure out what I wanted to do with the company.

Q: You obviously went for someone from the inside, correct?
A: Yes, that is exactly what happened. Two things: Not a lot of people think about succession that far in advance, and secondly, a lot people just end up selling the company. That's really hard. It's like giving your baby away. My view of it was kind of like your kid going off to university. They're not in your house anymore and you're not the one that's mentoring them, but you can still keep an eye on them. I was very lucky that over the years I had several people who had stayed with me a long time, and I had always had a second-in-command structure. Since my second or third year of operating, I had always been bringing someone up behind me that people could go to, if I wasn't around. I had a couple people in that role and the person that I had chosen had stepped into that role a few years before that.

Q: Did you test them?
A: Yeah. Before I was thinking of handing the job over I took a two-month sabbatical. I really took a sabbatical, which I recommend highly. I cut myself off from email, I did not check in, and just said to everybody, "If you need me, I'm going to depend on you to call me."

Q: We're you okay with that?
A: I had done a month before where I hadn't cut myself off from email. And, I had been away for a month a couple of times and things had really gone well. So, when I did this two month, I gave everybody my cell phone numbers; I told my clients what my cell phone numbers were, but I basically said, "I'm going to take this sabbatical. I've been working hard for a very long time, but if you need me, please don't hesitate to call me." And with everybody here I gave them some parameters if they needed to contact me. So that was a really, really good test, and the first phone call I got was a week before I came back to work. It was amazing. I wouldn't do that all the time but I think that was a good test both for them and for me. That was the first test and that set me up with a lot of confidence.

Q: How did you decide?
A: I wanted a little bit of a management team that I knew and the advice that I got from my coach and my research was that you have to anoint one person. It's not a good idea to pick two or three. You really should pick one. Whereas there are a couple of people of my team who have a lot of responsibility, Linda was the one who I chose to be my successor.

Q: Was she an obvious choice?
A: She was, but she hadn't run a company before. The way I run my company is to give people responsibility for things so they had bits of experience doing that. She showed really strong promise.

Q: What are the characteristics you look for in a potential leader?
A: Longevity. Linda had been here for about seven or eight years. She had the respect of the staff, which is really important to us because culture is a critical foundation of our success here. We also had similar philosophies.

Q: What one piece of advice would you give to business owners who find themselves in need of a successor?
A: Start early. You really should start thing about selecting a successor about five years in advance. And, you really need to think about what your role will be going forward because it's a really big change in your life.



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