Know who will replace your key people, before you need to
When a general manager leaves, a great deal goes with them. What they know about the orebody, the workforce and the regulator is specific to that property and mostly undocumented, and a successor picks up most of it by standing next to them. A handover that happens after the departure rather than before it is not really a handover at all.
Lincoln Strategic builds and maintains succession plans for the roles a mining business cannot run without, using the same network and the same assessment discipline as a live search.
What it covers
Succession work usually starts with one critical role and grows outwards:
- Identifying the roles where a sudden departure would genuinely hurt, which is rarely the whole organisation chart
- Assessing internal successors against what the role will need next, rather than what it needed last time
- Building and refreshing an external bench, so a named alternative exists for every critical seat
- Board design and non-executive succession, including the skills a board will need for its next phase
- Corporate recruitment strategy, where an internal talent function wants an outside view of how it hires
- Recruitment vendor assessment, where a client wants to know whether its existing suppliers are earning their fees
How it works
We work from the plan rather than from the vacancy. That means agreeing which roles are genuinely critical, understanding what each of them will demand in three years, and being honest about which internal people are ready, which are close, and which are not going to get there. Development recommendations follow, and so does an external bench for the seats where nobody internal is close.
Plans are worth revisiting each year. People leave, projects change shape, and a successor who was two years away either becomes ready or becomes unavailable, so a plan left untouched stops describing the business it was written for.
Testing the plan against the people
A bench is only useful if the people on it would move when it comes to the crunch, and if the internal candidates on it are ready. Our Talent assessment and evaluation service tests both, and because we run retained searches for the same roles across the industry, we know what it would take to bring an external name across.
Speak to your Lincoln Strategic contact about the roles you could not fill tomorrow.
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