British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's resignation this week and lightning-fast replacement by David Cameron illustrates an organizational inevitability, writes executive coach and speaker Scott Eblin on his Next Level Blog.  Namely, that your leadership role will end.

One of the tips Eblin offers for CEOs pondering on and strategizing around this is to "Do as much good as you can while you can."  To me this speaks to succession planning – an arrow in the "quiver" of leadership practices that, in my assessment, is rarely used (or maybe I should say, rarely fully and effectively executed), but which can be incredibly powerful in terms of both employee engagement and building trust in the workplace for the long term.

Winning Workplaces has written on succession planning based on lessons learned by both outgoing and incoming leaders of our small honored firms, and others.  Here are the top five related articles on our website you might want to check out:

1. The Changing Face of Succession Planning
2. A Conversation with Helen Johnson-Leipold of the Johnson Family Companies, Part 1 (see the third question and answer)
3. Tips to Best Utilize Older Workers in Your Workforce (see the fourth paragraph down starting with bold text)
4. Succession as a Values Test
5. Casting a Wider Ownership Net

Related: Leaders of two of our award-winning firms get into more detail of their varying succession planning experiences in one of our most popular webinar recordings.  Access it here.

Image credit: Changing Trends in Human Resource Management