Nothing Succeeds Like Succession

Toyota's Cooper is dedicating time to prepare her organization for the future. That future includes being as proactive as possible, staying ahead of the business needs. It also means a commitment to active succession planning.

Two years ago, Cooper sat down for 90 minutes with each of the direct reports of her direct reports, 27 people in total. Each meeting was an open coaching session structured around her ideas of what IT leaders will need to be in 10 years. She then crafted a 3 to 4 page letter for each team member, detailing the capabilities she wanted them to develop and a plan for showing how they were achieving them. Her direct reports received a summary of what she sent to their reports.

Cooper didn't stop there. She's pushing her senior management team to hold similar leadership coaching sessions with their staff. She herself has fireside chats twice a quarter with the next tier of managers, bringing in five or six of them at a time to talk about management challenges and the need to think strategically about business and IT.

She also rotates high-potential IT staff into the business, to prime them for a broader understanding of the company. She sends them for training, both internally and externally, such as to Boston University's "Pocket MBA for CIOs" and Gartner Group's CIO boot camps.

Cooper says she spends about 30 percent of her time on coaching and mentoring. But Cooper believes it's been worth it. "It's subjective...but I think the quality of decision making and general performance is quite improved," she says. By the same token, Cooper adds that "if someone had done this for me when I was early in my career, and I had insight into how much work I still had to do or what my strengths were, that would've been a huge thing."