In part 2 of this 3 part series of blogs on succession planning we look at understanding your situation, how succession planning fits with your overall business strategy and provide guidance on how to understand your succession needs.
Understanding your situation
Do any of the following sound familiar?
- You often have to recruit managers from outside to compensate for lack of experience in your teams
- Once promoted to a key role, employees take a long time to become fully productive
- If one of your senior people leaves, your business suffers whilst you find a replacement
- You’ve lost some of your brightest employees because they feel they lack a career path
If any of these ring true, it is possible that a likely cause is lack of good succession planning and associated internal development programmes.
It is helpful to think about how succession planning fits with your overall business strategy. Succession planning is not an exercise that will make an overnight difference but taking a more strategic view will help you understand how to improve. Before implementing a new people management strategy, you need to understand what sorts of people and skills are key to your success, how this might change in the future and how you intend to source, retain and build valuable skills. To help clarify this understanding, try answering the following questions:
- What sorts of people tend to do well in this organisation?
- Why do people leave? Do you carry out exit interviews?
- Are there skills that are being under-utilised within your senior managers?
- Do your other employees have aspirations and talents that are not being recognised?
- What is stopping you from growing/improving your organisation?
- Do you have performance management processes in place?
Understanding your succession needs
A gap analysis process may help you to review your practices. For each of the following pairs of statements, indicate where your business is on the scale at the moment. You could also get managers in other parts of the organisation to complete this exercise, to see how practices differ. This will help you to identify your priorities and highlight where the gaps are in your succession planning process - either you can’t answer some of the questions, or you score on the lower (left hand) side of the scale.
| We have no formal forecast of the numbers of managers we will need in the future. | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | We have a clear idea of how many managers we will have to recruit or train over the next three years. |
| We recruit people based on their ability to do the immediate job. | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | We look for potential in the people we recruit, with a view to developing them into senior roles. |
| Employees tend to stay in one job for long periods of time, or to move on elsewhere. | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | All our key employees have clear career paths to follow. |
| We rely on a small number of standard training programmes to develop employees. | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | We use a range of development programmes to suit the individual and the need. |
| We don’t know anything about the capabilities of our employees, or their expectations about their career here. | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | We have clear, documented information about the capabilities and aspirations of our employees. |
| We have no clear idea of the relative importance of jobs to our business (apart from through salary levels). | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | We have a list of roles that are key to the success of the business, and can explain why they are important. |
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