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

 

Aspirations, Conversations, and Options

What is a Career Management process for? How is it different from Succession Planning?

There is a need for an organization to have a ready pool of talent. There is also an individual’s need to have a satisfying and rewarding career. While Succession Planning caters to the former need, Career Management is supposed to cater to the later need.

As is obvious, Succession Planning and Career Management must be integrated processes -both go hand-in-hand.

Now let’s say a fellow HR professional tells you “We have good Career Management processes in place in our company. Aspirations of the individuals are captured in a template and we see how best to cater to those aspirations.”

How would you know whether Career Management process in his/her company really caters to individual aspirations or not?

I can think of a few possible areas that can be explored from an employee’s perspective:

• What career discussions/conversations happen with you and how frequently?
• What gets discussed in these career conversations? What opportunities do you have to express your career aspirations? Does the process involve exploration of reasons for your career preferences/aspirations too?
• What developmental support is provided to you to work towards your career aspirations?
• Are career opportunities presented to you as diktats (there is this opportunity-take it or leave it-we can only discuss how best can you fit in) or are options provided to you from which you can choose?

Career movements are tricky. Both the needs of the organization and the individuals need to be taken care of.

But a Career Management process where:

1. an individual doesn’t get a space to express his/her aspirations; and
2. where career opportunity discussions are not about ‘options’ but about ‘I feel this is the best for you and so take it.’

is most certainly flawed in addressing individual needs.

This can lead to a paradoxical situation in an organization - significant investment in talent and capability building but significant leakages and consequently inadequate strength of talent pipeline.

How would the organization respond in this case? Think of a situation where you put in significant efforts but derived insignificant benefits. How did you feel and respond?

-

Sourav

Conflicting priorities in Career Management

Career Management, as distinct from succession planning, supposedly takes care of aspirations of employees. Hence it is from the point of view of the employee.

But is an employee the only party involved in the process of shaping his career? There exists a number of ‘lenses’ – organizational lens, lens of the parent hierarchy (as manifested by immediate boss), lens of the ‘receiving’ hierarchy, and lens of the employee himself.

What are the interests of these different lenses and how do they interact to shape the career of an employee?

Organizations might have different definitions of career growth. Vertical as well as horizontal movements might be seen as growth avenues. There also might be an assumption that all individuals want vertical/horizontal career growth.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks to career planning comes from the immediate superior of an individual. The immediate superior has a primary interest –that of ensuring performance of his team. It becomes easier for him to ensure team performance if an individual stays longer. This primary interest at times is at odds with the interest of the individual. Sometimes you will find superiors not sharing details of career opportunities with their subordinates, as they do not want to let go of them. This is where mechanisms like Internal Job Portals come in. But even when you provide visibility of career opportunities to individual employee’s, a boss still wields significant power. He may actively dissuade an employee from applying for certain positions. I wonder whether this kind of behavior is over the board. He may also act very difficult in letting go of an employee who has been selected for another position (‘He is working on important projects. I can’t relieve him from his current role for next 6 months.’)

Even within the same company you find some departments/functions where employees from non-traditional backgrounds do well, and other departments/functions where a non-traditional profile struggles to perform. Career Moves involve making moves outside your own specialization areas. A recipient function plays a large role in setting up a cross-functional mover for success or failure. From an organizational perspective, it is important to recognize which functions are hostile to incoming career movers and work with them to change their behaviors. From an individual employees perspective, it is important to factor in what kind of support systems would be available in a function the employee is considering making a movement into. The recipient function also faces a challenge of figuring out on what basis to select/reject internal candidates – a sensitive issue.

What about the individual employee? Career Management/Planning is meant to take care of his aspirations. What happens if an employee wants to specialize but the company believes in general managerial competence? What happens if an employee wants to work in different functions in a company that believes in specialization? Many a times employees equate growth with promotions – how does a company ensure that even horizontal movements are seen by employees as growth opportunities? Career Management is based on the assumption that employees are aspirational. There are different life stages when an employee may not desire movement. Would such an employee not be considered ‘career oriented’ and subsequently ‘discounted’? For an employee his career is enmeshed with the other roles he plays outside work in his family/society– what happens when there are clashes between these different roles?

Career Management/Planning is necessary but there are multiple and conflicting priorities that tug at the process. At the end of the day, the ‘employee lens’ is what a Career Management/Planning process is supposed to cater to. But this can be done effectively only by identifying and managing the conflicting priorities of all stakeholders.

-

Sourav