“AND JUSTICE FOR ALL” was created to provide legal services, free of charge, for Utah’s most vulnerable citizens. In its creation, the Disability Law Center, Legal Aid Society of Salt Lake and Utah Legal Services joined forces to provide a stable and consistent source of funding for their clients, a shared physical home, and shared back office functions.
The executive director of AJFA, as well as the executive directors of its three partner organizations, were all long-term leaders of their respective agencies. AJFA could foresee the time coming when all of them might consider retirement within a relatively short window, posing a succession problem of serious and destabilizing dimensions.
Pathway was engaged to provide succession planning services, in a situation where none of the four ED’s was actually leaving yet. These leaders and their senior staff gathered to create a collective succession plan for AJFA, and individual plans for their own agencies.
The four partner leaders assessed their personal impact on the cultures of their organizations, identified future leaders for intentional development, laid the framework for emergency succession plans in case of a crisis, to set goals for developing an infrastructure that would stabilize their organizations longer term through any departure at any position, and to institutionalize succession planning as a normal activity in each agency.
