Succession Planning and Management: A Key to Sustaining Competitiveness

We have learned though years of interaction with employees, at all levels of organizations both private and public sectors, that many desire to know that the organization is focused on providing opportunity for continuous development beyond their current capabilities. Many research papers and best practice summaries also noted that one of the most important means of keeping employees today is to ensure the organization has a succession process in place.  It is also important that employees perceive the process as fair.  Building and implementing a Succession Planning Process is considered one of the key elements to successful retention of employees.  However, while many companies talk of Succession Planning, most find it cumbersome once they begin and eventually return to the more traditional replacement planning. 

SAGL has designed a rigourous methodology to effectively manage Succession Planning that results in retaining and engaging your talent.  Many companies use the formal performance evaluations as one of the key indicators for identification of your high potential and promotable employees. The result is often that highly effective and successful individuals are put into a position where they do not succeed. Another by-product of this approach is that a mentality of entitlement is created for those who consistently have ‘exceeds expectations’ on the formal year-end review. The reality is that those who exceed expectations are experts at their current job and nothing more.

Working with our clients we help facilitate the development of Succession Planning by taking them through a six-stage process.  Our process focuses organizations on building something meaningful because it is consistent with their business plan and with their corporate values. The process begins by focusing on building a relevant and defendable model of leadership that will sustain business success.  After the development of the model we build a series of activities that enable differentiation of employees who are:

1. •Role Experts in their current roles and, while outstanding at what they do, are not high potential or promotable but key for development and helping other as role experts.
   

2. •High potential but not yet promotable without a series of activities that are not just focused on formal learning.
   

3. •Promotable because they have successfully and repeatedly demonstrated the key characteristics needed to begin in a new role.
   

We believe that Succession Management has to have a mindset change. We need to stop thinking of ‘up the organizational ladder’ as the only focus of talent management and succession planning.  Instead of the ladder analogy we offer the perspective of a jungle gym or a climbing apparatus. Creating a mindset where success means the mastery of different capabilities and competencies will open the thinking of employees to the fact that there are many more opportunities than just remaining within the structure of their current role.

Through the Succession Planning Process your organization will learn how to:

1. •Build a strong business case for the implementation of Succession Planning that is specific to the needs of the organization now and into the future
   

2. •Link the company values, behavioural competencies, skills and knowledge needed to begin an integrated Talent Management and Succession Planning process
   

3. •Review recent trends and corresponding pressures driving the recent increased focus on building Succession Planning in general, as well as, specific to their organization
   

4. •Differentiate between succession and replacement planning
   

5. •Determine if your organization is ready for Succession Planning and what needs to be in place to have a successful plan
   

6. •Have the knowledge of how to build a learning curriculum focused on developing your leaders of tomorrow, today
   

7. •Build a definition of leadership specific to the organizations history, culture and values.
   

8. •How to use your corporate values and behavioural competencies in the process
   

9. •How to safely and successfully integrate multi-source feedback and other evaluations into the process
   

10. •Define your goals for Succession Planning
    

11. •Identify the critical success factors for your succession plan in order to build relevant measures of success
    

12. •Make a policy on if you should or should not share with your employees if they are or are not high potential