Succession Planning

What are the seven steps to succession planning ?

1. Get To Know Your Company’s Vision And Growth Plans:
2. Create An Inventory Of Existing Skill Sets
3. Ask People About Where They Would Like To Be
4. Evaluate Each Person’s Future Potential
5. Inform Employees Of Their Succession Potential
6. Groom According To Skill Sets, Desired Trajectory, And Potential
7. Offer Retention Programs That Help Ensure Key Staff Will Stay
   
   

Why is succession planning important?

1. A succession plan upholds the company’s vision and mission, ensuring that owners and executives understand the business’s future direction.
2. A succession plan also creates awareness about the quality and strength of your high-potential employees.
3. Succession planning improves the company retention and employee satisfaction rates. The benefits of succession planning in the organization is to attract quality and credible candidates.
4. A comprehensive succession plan provides you a competitive advantage over your competitors and increases your chances of dealing with disruptions. Only capable and visionary leaders can take risks and maintain the company's reputation and long-term growth. This allows them to focus on longer-term business opportunities.
5. Succession plans is an ongoing process that reduces time and financial resources in shortlisting, recruitment and external leadership training when you have a qualified stream of candidates in the company.
   
   

What should a succession plan include?

1. Understand Strategy & Structure

   To be effective in developing successors, you need to know what the goals and interests of your organization are. Where do you want your company to be in the future? What strategy and organizational structure do you need to achieve these goals?

2. Evaluate Employee Skills

   Begin planning succession with an honest assessment of your employees' unique abilities and strengths. This assessment should include all the material / technical skills that employees say they have the soft / behavioral skills that you see in your employees.

3. Training and Development

   Decide what milestones or goals to create for each employee. What skills do they need to learn to be more effective? What tasks or projects can they do to develop these skills? Does your organization have the right tools and programs to develop these internal training programs?

4. Provide Recognition and Advancement Opportunities

   As your employees specialize and achieve their goals, make sure you recognize their accomplishments and company contributions. Recognition can take many forms, whether it is in the form of promotions, salary increases or other compensation and benefits. If they are transparent about the rewards available to them, they can see the long-term benefits of staying with the company and sticking to their succession plan.

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Who is responsible for succession planning?

The commitment to succession planning starts with top management, led by the CEO. Without this commitment, the process will simply not work effectively. Further, the Board of Directors plays the key role in leading succession planning for the CEO, while also holding the CEO accountable for ensuring that succession planning is not only in place, but is working.

HR will typically be responsible for developing the process and all related materials, as well for its implementation

What are some disadvantages of succession planning?

• Hiring the wrong person can create a number of problems that lead to poor performance and sales of the company.
• Pick someone too quickly just to appoint someone so a better candidate will come up later.
• If succession planning process is not conducted properly it will lead to poor decisions, disharmony and ultimately poor company performance as well.
  
  

What are the challenges to succession planning?

1. Deciding who to promote

   The pressure to repay loyalty or to work hard with progress can be intense, and no one likes feelings that hurt or put their foot down. But with careful planning, it is possible to add the right person to the role without disturbing your other candidates. Identifying potential candidates at the beginning of the subsequent planning process and properly arranging education and development courses is a possible solution to this pain point.

2. Resisting bias

   People get a sense of familiarity, and hiring managers and executives is no exception. Some men naturally lean towards men, some women lean towards women and vice versa. The urge to hire someone who fits a certain stereotype can end the process of thinking logically and skillfully. Planning ahead to identify the required traits required for a successor will ensure that a highly qualified job candidate (regardless of age, gender and background) is hired.

3. Maintaining company morale

   One of the downstream side effects is the negative impact it can have on company morale. Deep down, everyone worries about retirement or layoff. And the prohibition on talking about moving forward in one way or another can hinder open discussion and threaten the importance of post-planning in organizations.