Leadership Transitions and its Implications For Strategic Planning

Dotlich and Ciampa contend that “Business is a relay race that never ends. Of all the important transitions an organization must face, repeatedly and over time, perhaps the most difficult is the passing of the baton from one leader to the next"1 . An organization must institutionalize and continually improve its leadership transition plan in order to excel. My research focused on the role that HR could play to improve KAU’s leadership transitions by finding out how “front-line” stakeholders, i.e. middle management and their employees, experience existing organizational changes. My findings led me to the following observations: 1) effective leadership transitions are important to an organization’s ability to achieve strategic goals, and can be generalized to Saudi culture and organizations 2) Problematic transitions cause the same kinds of problems for employee stakeholders across cultures 3) Cultural factors can be a great obstacle to organizational success. This study provides some preliminary insights into the role that culture plays in determining the feasibility of applying “best practices” in Human Resource Management. I have made some recommendations that I judged to have merit and a good possibility for providing some improvement to the current KAU dysfunctional transition processes. Keywords: Strategic planning; Leadership transitions; Higher education; Modeling SWOT .