Ensuring success in succession planning
"Success without a successor is failure." - Hans Finzel, The Top Ten Mistakes Leaders Make.
It is widely accepted that organisations today are operating in more complex and less stable environments. More than ever there is a demand for today’s leaders to be high performing and sophisticated to ensure the success and even survival of their organisation. This is true for small to medium sized firms as well as large ones. Strong leadership is and always has been a relatively scarce commodity within companies.
To lose a strong, effective CEO is a serious blow to any organisation, particularly if they do not have an immediate replacement! To manage this risk, organisations need to re-engineer the role of the CEO so that there is less dependency on him or her should they leave. In other words the business must be structured in a way that it can still operate independently. Alongside this, organisations must make sure they have effective succession planning processes in place so that they can quickly identify a new replacement with minimum disruption.
It's not just succession at the top that requires attention, high staff turnover can happen at every level in organisations and this can prove costly if external recruitment methods are the mainstay of your response. With high staff turnover, the ability of your business to deliver effectively for its customers is also at risk. For these reasons, it’s important to have a pool of talented people in place for every job at every level. So how can you ensure success in your succession planning?
At CHPD, we believe there are five key considerations:
Understand your organisation’s vision and match accordingly. It is important that when thinking about succession planning you match the future goals and needs of the organisation with the available talent. Engage the support of senior management in this step of the process to help articulate the vision for what the organisation will look like in the future and to help create an understanding of what potential roles and skills will be needed to support such a vision. This will then enable you to identify the job families or key roles and associated capabilities, which will be critical for the future. Having completed this ‘role profiling’ activity you will then be in the great position of being able to plan for an immediate successor should any gaps arise through, for example, resignation or restructuring. Companies must have a talent pool, from which they can quickly select to fill any gaps.
Understand who belongs in your talent pool. Too often organisations do not use objective measures or predictors of future performance, sometimes relying on hearsay rather than evidence. As a result they end up with plenty of people in their ‘pool’ but not much ‘talent’! There are a number of successful ways to gather credible data for your organisation that will enable you to make informed decisions about your future talent pools. The Centre for High Performance Development, which works closely with many organisations on succession management initiatives, suggests the following. Firstly, you must understand how capable your people are at leading. The most effective way to gain an insight into this area is to undertake simulated exercises. In this way, you can get a feel for how people would react in potential scenarios as well as how they perform in their current jobs. Secondly, it is vital to understand leadership style in your people - how do they like to lead and what are their career aspirations. Through collecting data on both these aspects of performance you will be able to identify your talent pool and provide focused development for them.
Implement appropriate leadership development for talent pools. Once you have identified your talent the next step is to provide the right development steps and challenges. This part of the process is essential in helping people build the skills needed for their new roles. It is important that alongside tailored training programmes there are also work-based development opportunities (such as key project secondments, lateral moves, job rotations, etc) to assist employees in gaining the necessary experience and knowledge. These opportunities are the real test of whether your talent pools has the true motivation to lead an organisation through the good and the potentially tough times ahead.
Ensure that any external recruitment is linked in to succession planning. We all agree that recruitment is both expensive and time consuming for organisations. With this in mind it is important that when hiring externally you get the best. External candidates for certain roles should also be measured in terms of both their leadership capability and style – as we outline for internal candidates in point two above. This is particularly important for graduate schemes, as it is widely agreed that a graduate will try three to four different job roles before they find a role that they want to stay in. Gathering credible data will help ensure that you make successful appointments onto such schemes. Ongoing review and measurement. It is important to undertake a regular review and evaluation of how the succession planning process is working to ensure that it is fully integrated with the organisation and its structure as it evolves over time. Based on the review, adjustments can be made. This will ensure that the key roles and capabilities needed are still relevant to the business needs.
Finally, one important point to note when working on succession planning; your process must be transparent to all levels of the organisation to engender confidence and trust. With this and the above factors in place your organisation will have a successful method for identifying and developing current and future talent and so ensure success in your succession planning.
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