Succession Planning

What are leadership and most critical roles in your organization? While leadership roles (based on position in hierarchy) might be easier to identify, you will need some guidelines to identify most critical roles. Some possible guidelines are:

·        Roles critical to current and/or future (next 2-3 years) success of your company.

·        Roles which require specialist knowledge/skills and for which the candidate pool is limited.

·        Roles that have a high demand-supply inequity and hence face high risk of attrition/continuous churn.

So is there a need to have a ‘succession pipe’ for your ‘leadership’ and ‘critical’ roles? I will contend yes.

That requires your leadership team to have an established succession planning process.

What are the important elements of a succession planning process? These include:

·        Role Identification.

·        Employee/candidate Identification.

·        Leadership buy-in and involvement.

 

I have already elaborated on ‘role identification’ piece. Let me know delve a bit more into other 2 pieces.

When thinking of candidates for succession pipe, think both internal and external. You might want to invest more in ‘internal candidates’ but it is important for you to have identified an ‘external pipe’ and have a possible sourcing strategy around it. There are a few other employee specific items that I have talked later about.

Leadership team needs to think about ‘organization’, beyond and above their own functional/team boundaries. There is a need for a ‘One Talent’ view for organization. This is easier said than practiced.

-

It is very important to ensure alignment between succession planning, career management (including individual development). 

Succession planning focusses on talent needs of organization. Think about what is it in it for an identified employee? Employee’s career aspirations surely need to be factored in.

It’s important not to assume what an employees’ career aspirations are. A structured periodic process around having dialogues with employees on their career aspirations is needed.

Think period wise (e.g. – employee ready in xx months, aa years) and capture what are development needs and development experiences employee needs to go through.  You need to invest in development of your talent.

-

Lastly, be patient and intentional!

A succession planning process doesn’t yield results overnight. Nor does it yield results without sustained efforts from leaders, managers, and employees.

-

Sourav