Should you be training your successor?

You love your job as a CIO. It's the best job you have ever had. But maybe you should have a reality check and see if you should be training your successor. It may be a painful idea for you. It takes time and energy to identify and train the person who will replace you one day, according to a column in The Wall Street Journal. It's a basic rule of management and one that is often skipped. Only about half of all public and private corporate boards have CEO-succession plans in place, according to a survey by the Center for Board Leadership with Mercer Delta Consulting. Just look around you and see how many CIO vacancies there are in both the private sector and the government. And think about the changing role of the CIO. What was once an easily defined position is now one of many challenges and changes.

A survey of 130 CIOs and senior IT executives by the Society for Information Management found that the position is not a rock solid one. The average tenure of those responding to the survey is 4.1 years. An almost equal number said they've held the position for a year or less and nearly 27 percent have held it for seven years or more.

"Succession planning isn't an event, it is a process that is best managed over three, five, even 10 years," because it involves building a pipeline of talent, says Joseph Bower, a Harvard Business School professor and author of  The CEO Within: Why Inside Outsiders Are the Key to Succession Planning. Yet, "a lot of CEOs are focused mostly on getting through the next quarter, and they ignore the hard work of grooming future leaders," he adds.

For more on this management tip:
- See InformationWeek article