Succession planning provides a risk assessment that uncovers vulnerabilities and skill gaps in your workforce. While looking for high-performing future leaders for your succession plan, weaker players are also highlighted who aren’t currently suited for their current job or lack specific skillsets. These people analytics and insights enable HR and managers to investigate these employees further and provide the best support to become better performers and reach their career goals, taking the form of reskilling or upskilling programs.
Once a company identifies potential employees for moving into senior positions, competency gaps can be easily identified for these employees to begin grooming for succession. This includes creating employee development and career plans to acquire the soft and hard skills, as well as the experience, they’ll need to perform well in their senior roles.
Create personalized training & development flows for your enterprise apps with WhatfixAnother essential benefit of succession planning is improved employee retention of your top employees by offering them growth opportunities. Creating a long-term plan enables organizations to reduce their reliance on recruitment so that talent is only sourced externally as a last resort. This also showcases to your best talent that you have a plan for them to grow into your leadership positions, and that your organization invests in its employees.
A succession plan requires your company to identify internal candidates with values, skills, and desire to take on vacant critical jobs. And if there are no internal candidates who seem right for leadership positions, then recruitment teams are able to begin an external search early in the process.
One of the side-effects of creating a succession plan for your organization is the negative impact on the morale of your workforce. The taboo of talking about moving on in one way or another can impede open discussion and threaten the importance of succession planning in organizations. It also presents uncomfortable issues among employees, as team members will wonder why they were not chosen to replace the vacated role. To be effective, succession planning needs to be an open and transparent process where leaders openly discuss company structure and succession plans.
An essential part of succession planning is anticipating future needs. Companies tend to overlook the fact that the introduction of the latest trends and technology keeps changing the nature of work. To create an effective succession plan, companies need to consider how these changes might impact the responsibilities associated with leadership positions and prepare the successors accordingly.
Companies spend a lot of time developing detailed succession plans, but this can become stalled in the implementation phase. This is a common mistake. It is important to review and update your succession plan regularly. You should never go more than six months without reviewing your succession plan and re-evaluating the successor’s readiness to move into new roles.
There are a few different types of succession plans to consider, including leadership development and executive succession, departure planning, and emergency succession planning.
Let’s look at each of these examples.
Executive succession planning is important as it pertains to the top leaders in your company. However, not every employee can be an executive and those that have potential need time and development. This is why executive succession planning is critical, so you can develop leaders who are ready to step in at the top of your company when needed and keep things running smoothly.
As the name implies, departure succession planning involves planning for the loss of an integral employee. As soon as an employee indicates that they are leaving or puts in their notice, companies should start the departure succession planning process. The earlier you begin the departure planning, the better, and you’ll improve your chances of a smooth transition.
Finally, you may find yourself in a situation where you need emergency succession planning. While planning a succession during an emergency is never ideal, it could be necessary, and having a plan already in place could be the difference in mitigating potential disaster for your company. In this case, companies typically elect an interim replacement to take over until a permanent successor is found.
After evaluating the positions for succession planning, the next step is to consider if current team members are capable of fitting into the role or have the potential to grow into it over time.
This requires you to look at employee performance objectively and carefully considering every individual for skills and emotional intelligence. Your highest-potential employees are lifelong learners who are excellent problem-solvers, adaptable, and able to take on responsibility.
The 9-box grid framework is a great tool to use to assess employee performance and enable succession planning.
The exercise maps employees against two axes: current performance and future potential. The vertical (y) axis indicates growth potential, referring to an individual’s potential to grow into leadership roles. The horizontal axis (x) represents an employee’s current performance, identifying whether they are below, meeting, or exceeding performance expectations.
Here’s what your succession planning organizational chart will look like:
Another factor to consider in your succession plan is identifying any business challenges in the next 1-5 years. An environmental scan will provide you with enough information to begin the succession planning process. Environmental scans are conducted during a brainstorming session at a team meeting or surveying or talking with stakeholders.
Here’s what your environmental scan worksheet will look like.
What’s happening inside and outside your organization:
In the near future
In the distant future
After you determine which positions are mission-critical and have a significant vacancy risk, the next step is to define the core competencies that are must-have success factors for each position.
Creating a developmental plan for potential successors helps employees acquire the required competencies to progress in the organization. An employee development plan combines formal training, thoughtful coaching, trusted mentorship, and key assignments.
Creating a development plan for a successor includes:
Since you’ve dedicated many hours to your succession plan, take time to monitor the success of your efforts and make a plan to correct any pain points. Evaluating your organization’s succession plan annually allows you to continuously refine your strategy.
To evaluate your succession plan, consider the following:
To help you create your own succession plan, we’ve created a free succession plan template to help your get started. You can download and customize this template below:
FREE TEMPLATE Get a free copy of our customizable Succession Plan template.✓ Thank you, the checklist will be sent to your email
Conclusion TitleFor companies, the benefits of succession planning are clear and significant. In addition to adding fresh perspectives and enhancing the workplace culture, creating a succession plan helps companies thrive by driving innovation, increasing revenue, and attracting top talent. It also helps to provide a proactive solution to people-based business continuity risks.
Organizations should invest in digital adoption platforms such as Whatfix to find the maximum ROI on their employee learning and development programs.
Using a DAP as your training software empowers employees to upskill themselves on the latest tools, applications, and digital processes without disrupting their workflow and productivity. It’s the best resource to make your employee development plans future-ready and valuable.
With Whatfix, L&D teams are empowered with no-code tools to create in-app guided content, such as step-by-step flows, interactive walkthroughs, task lists, smart tips, and self-help knowledge bases that overlay on your digital applications and processes.
Organizations are able to capture employee event data to understand how their workforce is engaging with their digital applications, allowing L&D teams to understand the levels of software adoption, feature adoption, digital skill gaps, and more – and to refine their onboarding, training, and development programs.
