The aim of succession planning is to be able to fill key roles effectively if a current post holder leaves the organisation. Succession planning programmes typically include practical, tailored work experience relevant for future roles.
Which posts are covered by succession planning?
The first step is to identify business-critical roles for which potential successors are needed. Succession planning schemes can focus on individual senior or key positions, or take a more generic approach by targeting a ‘pool’ of positions for which similar skills are needed or essential in emergencies.
Individual positions
Succession planning usually covers the most senior jobs in the organisation, identifying individuals with the potential to step into these posts as short-term or longer-term successors. Proactive development through job moves or secondments around the business can provide a ready source of future leaders. A focus on the most senior posts means that only a small proportion of the workforce would be part of the process. This makes it more manageable. That said, many large organisations operate local models in divisions, sites or countries where the same or similar processes are applied to a wider population.
Roles, not jobs – the use of pools
There’s a growing focus on identifying groups of jobs and developing potential successors for a variety of roles. Jobs might be clustered by role, function or level so that generic skills can be developed. The aim is to develop pools of talented people, each one of whom is adaptable and capable of filling a variety of roles. Because succession planning is concerned with developing longer-term successors as well as short-term replacements, each pool will be considerably larger than the range of posts it covers.
Approaches to succession planning
All organisations need to be able to find people with the right skills to fill key positions.
Traditionally, large companies ran highly-structured, confidential and top-down succession schemes aimed at finding internal successors for key posts and planning their career paths accordingly. But with growing uncertainty, increasing speed of change and flatter structures, succession planning of this sort has declined.
A further problem with traditional succession planning was that it failed to take account of non-managerial roles – a brilliant scientist, for example, who might be crucial to the future of the organisation and who wanted to stay in a research role.
In a climate of enduring skills shortages and research suggesting a lack of confidence in the leadership potential within the existing workforce, interest in succession planning has revived. Yet, recent reports suggest that despite growing investment in leadership development, improvement in leader quality has stalled. Our research report Leadership – easier said than done looks at the barriers to leadership and good people management in practice. It also emphasises that developing future leaders has to be aligned with supportive organisational processes (reward and recognition, decision-making, cross-functional working) and organisational culture.
Modern succession planning looks quite different, with a broader vision, greater openness and diversity, and closer links to wider talent management practices. For example, progressive organisations who adopt an inclusive whole workforce approach to managing and developing talent will identify business critical roles at all levels within their organisation.
