CHS Leaders Help Shape Succession Report

Succession planning was listed as a main concern of cooperative leaders at this summer’s 15 regional CHS owner town hall meetings. Many shared concerns of how to fill key leadership roles in the years ahead.

That challenge was echoed in a report, “Succession Matters: Strengthen your leadership pipeline to shape future business strategy,” released recently by Korn Ferry, a global people and organizational advisory firm. In the report, Carl Casale, president and chief executive officer of CHS, and Adam Holton, senior vice president, human resources, CHS, shared the cooperative’s strategy to meet the challenges of the rapidly evolving agriculture and energy industries while growing in size and geographic scale.

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“It’s been a time of phenomenal growth and we’ve almost doubled in size over the past five years,” Casale says in the Korn Ferry report. “The key to this has been a shift away from a short-term, silo mentality to an enterprise mentality, with a systematic focus on talent management, development and succession. We need to promote people who can demonstrate the capacity of thinking more broadly. We want our people to think bigger, create synergies and drive enterprise collaboration.”

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According to the report, potential is also not being identified accurately or early enough, so leaders aren’t getting the breadth of experiences to help them make the transition.

Within CHS, Casale said he does not expect all positions to be filled internally, but he does want to see CHS internal candidates compete as viable candidates for important positions.

“Regardless of CHS financial results, if my successor does not come from inside, I will consider my tenure as CEO a failure,” he says.

To identify those who will be successful in leadership roles, Korn Ferry says it is essential for organizations to have a complete talent picture of the whole person, not just a snapshot of job performance today.

“A core element in identifying potential is learning agility, which is particularly relevant in predicting who is likely to succeed in new, broader roles,” Holton says.

The Korn Ferry report was based on a global survey conducted at the end of 2014 covering 54 countries and companies ranging in size from 500 to 50,000 employees. CHS was among these companies. The survey generated more than 1,000 responses from business leaders. Of the respondents, only one in three were satisfied with their talent management programs.

View the entire report and the CHS client success story.

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