Southern Company Case Study

Evaluate the effectiveness of the roles that the strategic leaders played in the formation of the performance management strategy.

Southern Company is an electric utility company headquartered in Atlanta, GA. The company

owns electric utilities in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Mississippi and services roughly 4.4

million customers. Southern Company also provides fiber optics and wireless communications.

Southern Company brands are known for excellent customer service, high reliability and retail

electric prices that are below the national average (Goldsmith & Carter, 2010).

Historically, Southern Company hired at the entry level and promoted individuals internally

for leadership positions. Over the years, Southern Company developed a group of leaders that

possessed a great level of business knowledge and affiliated with the organization and culture.

Southern Company decided that it was time to review and restore their succession planning and

Leadership development efforts to guarantee that they had a supportable source of effective

leaders to meet future business needs (Goldsmith & Carter, 2010).

Talent management is an organization's commitment to recruit, retain, and develop the most

talented and employees available in the job market. However, these are the components

necessary for talent management program strategy: recruitment, selection, promotion,

placement/assignment, on-boarding/assimilation, retention initiatives, rewards/recognition

programs, training and professional development, coaching/mentoring, leadership development;

performance management (Silzer & Dowell, 2010).

The succession planning process placed too much emphasis on replacement planning and

not enough on developing critical talent pools. There was not enough focus on high-potential

talent five to ten years from the executive level. As a result, information on the succession plans

and high-potential individuals was kept in a series of separate files located across Southern

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