5 new considerations for Succession Planning

In our blog last week, Professor Nick Kemsley, outlined trends in how talented people are viewing their careers and their interactions with their employers.

In the video for this blog, he explores how these trends might translate that across to succession planning - and highlights five key considerations for us

1. Take a look at the realistic and valid timescale of a succession plan - are 4 - 5 year plans looking to far in the future? Should we be focussing on perhaps shorter succession timelines - 2 or 3 years?
2. Move away from having no or an outdated appraisal of mobility of your people Mobility feeds into succession plans - and career plan - but is a dynamic thing; what may not be possible one year due to children's schooling or aging parents, may be possible the following year.  And of course, just because someone is not mobile, does not mean that he or she cannot have a career!
3. Give managers the training and tools needed to have realistic succession conversations. One of the key factors to get more effective succession planning is to give managers the confidence and tools to have the conversations with individuals around careers and who can engage an individual in the organisation.  It's about the manager having access to, and being able to collate accurate data about future progression - and having the confidence to discuss this openly and honestly.
4. Extend your view of succession planning and look beyond your organisation. Our view is that succession planning approaches in organisations should match the way a talent thinks about their careers.  Talented employees tend to think about their careers across organisational boundaries. Why is it that we tend to think about career development just within the boundaries of our own organisations? This is brave thinking as what you are relying upon is your employer brand to let go and bring back your great people.
5. Start looking at succession planning as a business risk management process.  Succession planning is not always about the top of the organisation, some of the critical roles are often further down the organisation.  Sometimes it’s not just about having the right person in the role or a high potential, sometimes it’s just about the risk is associated with having somebody in the role all the time. The risk element really is made up of a number of components: individual capability risk; organisational risk and market risk. Succession planning itself is a business conversation around risk supported by systems that come from conversations between managers and employees. We often describe it using 3 circles whereby we talk about what the organisation needs, what the individual has in terms of their skillset, their performance, - and what the individual wants, their aspirations, their motivators, their mobility, a number of these factors. It's the job of the manager to broker that to the best outcome to try and balance those sometimes competing needs and to solve it for the good of the business and the good of the individual.

Learn more about each of these considerations by watching the video

 And catch up now if you need to see the first video.

 When you would like to learn more about succession planning, then do get in touch.

If you'd like to learn more about introducing robust succession planning, then read some of our other blogs.