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What is your succession management strategy?
As our company has greatly expanded in the last year, we haven't ever really focused on creating a succession management strategy, but we find we may soon be in need of one. What is your succession management strategy? How did you go about drafting it? What are the key elements to include?
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3 Answers
Donna,
You have already accomplished the first important step in realizing that succession planning is important for your organization. Having been involved in many succession planning processes my suggestion is to keep it very simple.
Start with your senior mgt team and make a list who might replace them if they were to leave or get promoted. For each person on the list determine their strengths, and development needs and when you think they might be able to assume the position. Meaning in 12 months, 18 months, or never. Develop for those people who you think have future opportunites a development plan to fill their gaps. Review the status of the development plans every 6 months to see where things stand for each individual. For positions where you have no clear internal replacement you will need to decide what your plan might be to fill the position in the future.
After you feel comfortable with the process for your senior team then move the process further down into your organization.
Hope it helps get you started.
An effective succession management strategy centres on the fact that shared knowledge is power. The more that an individual is able to share their knowledge and expertise, the better the development of the team, the group and the entire organisation.
I would deploy it as part of each individual’s development plan. By having someone to coach and mentor whilst being coached and mentored provides a means to fast-track learning and development in the organisation. There would also be huge gains from an organisational culture perspective.
Key elements would be value for diversity, continual learning, mapped development, commitment to growth (on an individual and corporate level) and alignment with the organisation’s strategy.
Key elements of a great succession strategy includes:
•) Succession management is more than placing a “high-potential” talent in a spot on a spreadsheet. This is about selecting the next generation of leaders who will steer, direct and decide significant issues that impact the investors, stockholders and customers of a company. Although it is easier to just select someone, it is much more important to know why one is selected as a successor.
•) Succession management is not an expense but an investment that may not pay off for years to come. Expediency, a cultural point-of-view that doesn’t always serve us best today, can become a bias that requires a return-on-investment that doesn’t serve succession management strategies well. Instead, I advocate for a longer term horizon that focuses on payback that can be seen over time.
•) Succession management must allow for high-potential talent to leave a company’s employment, and then return, over a longer time horizon. In today’s fluidity of talent, leaders must keep track of high-potential talent. Due to a variety of circumstances, things change but connections don’t have to. Why think of a “former” employee as someone who is persona non gratis when they leave? Rather, keep in touch, stay connected and think in terms of future investments to the company when the time, and circumstances are right.
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