“How a private university manages leadership legacy during its first president succession planning”

The aim of this research was to understand how this private and non-profit higher education institution saw the relevance and impact of its first presidential succession, to then establish a succession model that could minimize the risk associated with this evolution beyond its owners and founding members. Groves (2007) declared that succession planning is “a strategy employed by many organizations to be able to recruit and promote employees into leadership roles. This promotes retaining organizational memory, allows continuity in strategic direction, and reinforces organizational culture”. In order to achieve the research objective, a participatory action methodology was utilized to generate qualitative data in the form of in-depth interviews, to then be analysed by an action team. At completion, this effort was responsible for the development of an integrated succession model for the institution, which included a mix of best practices from the literature using the data collected as the source to understand the specific context of this organisation. For this organisation, it was the first time this form of collaborative reflection took place to tackle such a complex problem, integrating information from private, small, non-profit, higher education types of organisations. Of particular note are the findings on the multiple parts and pieces that the organisation must institute, such as the need for a functional board of directors or the required alignment between middle and top management levels, not just to sail through the first presidential succession but also to set in place a structure that will provide long-term sustainability to the governance structure of the institution, beyond the lifetime of its founding members