The Ultimate Guide to Succession Planning

Foreword

Succession Planning is essential to ensuring effective leadership and service delivery within every organisation, yet so few organisations measure the effectiveness of this activity. Managing ‘people risk’ requires planning a 'future state' to deal with anticipated – and unexpected – changes to people and roles.

But what are the core components of a succession plan, how are they validated and how can you can ensure your leadership, management and key roles are future-proof?

"Succession planning is the process of identifying and developing potential future leaders or senior managers, as well as individuals to fill other business critical positions, either in the short- or the long-term." Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD)

Economic uncertainty and recent shifts in how people view the workplace and its culture make this even more important and fluid.  

“Succession planning is the ‘flip-side’ of career planning”, says Ian Lee-Emery, Founder of Talent Management software provider Head Light. “Get it right and it can be a point of real engagement for employees in their careers in your organisation”.

While many employers will first look outside of the organisation to recruit individuals with rare skills or experience, this places great faith in the hiring process to get a good fit, and let’s face it, reliable information about past performance and achievements. Of course, many organisations are also concerned with the future supply of talent.

We've seen that changing demographics in the form of an ageing workforce, falling birthrates, continued globalisation and the 'rise of the knowledge worker' are squeezing the talent pool and putting greater pressure on companies to manage and grow the talent they already have. But reducing hiring risk is not the only benefit achieved from growing your own talent; you can also create an environment in which  employees are rewarded with career opportunities based on solid (and known) performance and aspirations. It means that the ‘lead time-to-perform’ in any new role is reduced as they bring with them an already established organisational network and cultural fit. 

“Employees are wise to this and when they observe these internal moves taking place. It spurs them on to perform and to think beyond their current role”, adds Ian. “Succession planning is, therefore, central to the internal element of talent management programmes,” says the CIPD. 

Succession Planning Models

In our ‘travels’, we see different models of, and approaches to, succession planning. Furthermore, they're often a combination of the ‘usual’ and ‘unusual’. 

The usual elements include concepts of: 

• geographic mobility (i.e. the desire or availability to work in a different location);
• functional mobility;
• flight risk and;
• (usually) potential and performance. 

From there, some form of narrative is often included around: 

• career aspirations;
• individual strengths and weaknesses and;
• sometimes, competence scores. 

More evolved implementations also see future roles identified by the individual and/or manager and maybe an assessment of a ‘talent category’ (often associated with a 9-box grid).

However, for most organisations, their current starting practice in Succession Planning is some way from their intended destination.

Many still produce large quantities of paper documentation, find themselves chasing bureaucratic processes and working through errors and omissions. Some commentators suggest that an annual talent review and succession planning process represents good practice – we think the world, and people’s circumstances and aspirations, change much more rapidly than that!

How can we be more agile with our approach so that we have more up to date information without investing hugely in unwieldy processes?

We need to 'include' and 'involve'. 

We have covered the concept of ‘Talent Consumerisation’ extensively in other places - and we'll take a look at this a little more in Chapter 5 of this eBook. Talent Consumerisation talks about the expectation of the employee that organisational processes will ‘wrap around’ them rather than the employee complying with some process. Examples of this include:

• A performance appraisal cycle to be based on their year in post, or year since moving into a new role as opposed to a financial or calendar year. 
• A performance management approach which is more dialogue focused. That is, it is based on check-ins, coaching and regular feedback rather than ratings and sign-off.

Both of these examples put the employee at the centre, and if succession planning is the flip-side of career planning, then the ‘employee voice’ around their own succession and career is valuable input.

For sure, the clock is ticking on succession planning as seen as putting ‘names in frames’, conducted annually, often created in a vacuum behind closed doors reflecting current structures and political dynamics.

However it’s not possible to ignore current organisational culture completely. A balance is needed between individual aspirations, individual learning, organisational agility, risk management and the wider organisational development agenda. Use this Guide to revisit your succession planning within your organisation.

In the first Chapter we'll look at:

• the tricky succession planning questions that you may get asked - that needn't be tricky!
• whether a fluid or a more prescriptive approach to succession planning is best suited for an organisation.