Any successful business needs to ensure continuity of operation and development opportunities for its people. Succession planning involves identifying successors for key posts and planning career moves and development activities for these successors, to provide them with the appropriate experience.
Succession planning enables a company to:
- improve internal recruitment by identifying candidates with known qualities and availability;
- actively develop longer-term successors;
- audit the available strengths within the organisation; and
- foster a corporate culture by developing a group of people with shared experiences and skills developed to meet the needs of the business.
Traditionally, succession planning has been an undisclosed part of the appraisal process. It has been assumed that, if the process were open, those identified as possible successors would be more aware of their marketability and those who were not seen as potential successors would be demotivated. In recent years, however, a more open approach has become common, in which the populations under consideration understand the methods used for identifying potential successors and the roles that are suitable for each individual. It is also now more common for organisations to develop a pool of individuals for a group or family of jobs. This allows the business to respond flexibly to its rapidly changing needs and acknowledges that individuals may decide to develop their careers outside the organisation.
Succession planning is usually focused on key roles that are often management positions. A wider view needs to be taken in times of very low unemployment and skill shortages. This is particularly important when redundancies are being made. Care must be taken not to allow rare skills to disappear from the organisation without some means of replacing them and to retain core expertise that will be needed in the future.
Succession planning has lost some prominence as a management tool because of the perceived bureaucratic nature of the data-gathering process, the difficulty of meeting employees' aspirations in de-layered organisations and the degree of inflexibility involved in pointing an individual in a particular direction. However, a flexible, open and developmental approach to succession planning helps organisations deliver tailored, proactive career development that is aligned to the needs of the business.
When developing a succession planning process, a company will need to address these issues:
- To what level should the process be applied and what jobs or groups of jobs require successors?
- Which managers will be responsible for the succession process?
- What methods of identification will be used?
- To what extent can the business provide appropriate development experiences to meet individual development plans?
- Is the organisation robust enough to ensure retention of the identified individuals?
- Is the process robust enough to allow for identified successors who leave the organisation?
- Does the process allow for the talents of all employees to be recognised, regardless of their age, sex, ethnic or racial origin or disability?