Techniques For Succession Planning

For businesses to function well, there must always be leaders to help the company grow. Whether decision-making is centralized or delegated, leadership is a critical skill that decision-makers must have in order to balance the people, resources, and time to achieve both short- and long-term goals.

Succession planning is a process where the organization looks for the employees who have the potential to take over managerial and leadership positions when they become vacant, identifying factors relevant to these positions and “grooming” the identified people. Succession planning helps you ready people to fill in and provide continuity of the leadership style in the organization.

Here are the steps you can take in implementing an effective succession planning:

1. Assess your business strategies. A manager lines your people up in such a way that they produce synergy that helps your business achieve the things you have defined in your mission statement. They make sure that their subordinates provide customer satisfaction, guaranteed 24 hours customer support, order-specific customizations, and other promises that you have offered to your customers.

2. Understand your business strategies, and assess whether your leaders are able to meet them. If not, there would be no use for you to have your candidates copy the leadership skills of your current managers. If they do help in fulfilling these strategies, then you can go ahead and pattern your succession planning with the current function.

New strategies can require new set of competencies from leaders, especially if the position is a new function where you cannot simply carbon copy proficiency requirements of the other managerial positions.

3. Define core competencies. Before you can decide who can be included in the succession planning, and how the trainings should go about, you have to be able to determine first what competencies the person must possess in order to be an effective leader. Ask yourself what the person should know in the business, how long should he/she have been with the company, what leadership qualities must be possessed, and what kind of work ethic is needed.

In defining these competencies, always remember that a leader is not just someone who is efficient in what they are currently doing. A salesperson who fronts the store and constantly exceeds quota for example may not necessarily possess the competence to be the marketing manager. He would have an edge in product planning, having received first-hand feedbacks from customers, but he must have leadership qualities as he would be handling employees as a manager, and not selling.

Among the competencies, distinguish which should be naturally possessed by the candidate, whether as a personal characteristic or something he/she developed throughout the years in the business, and which can be learned through training and actual immersion in the positions. By identifying the core factors, you can now make a checklist of requirements and check who are interested in your talent pool to become a leader and can fill all of the requirements.

4. Craft training programs. In order to fill in the technical skills for the position, you can create training programs together with the current leader and your human resource manager, which would address these skills. Will you conduct an in-house orientation? An apprenticeship? Or send them to seminars and training classes? Of course, training will require money and time, so be sure to make a timeline for the training. This way, you can easily cut candidates when they fail to gain the technical skills.

Having junior managerial positions is a good way to provide actual immersion to succession candidates. They get to work closely with the managers, and get to accomplish real workload. With this, they develop first-hand experience in the leadership role. This is even a good motivator for candidates as they can already feel their potential promotion once they excel.

5. Consider also the existence of office politics. While a certain candidate may technically be the most suitable, you must take into account the probable reaction especially of the more senior staff. It will be up to management to decide if the advantages of promoting someone who is more capable would outweigh the reaction of those who will be bypassed.

Finally, after implementing training, be sure to measure the effectiveness. Were the trainings provided enough to fill in the gaps your candidates have versus the competency requirements you set for the position? If not, why? Was it because they were not able to absorb the lessons, or was the training not compatible for the position in the first place?

Succession planning must be planned years in advance. Waiting until there is a vacancy would inevitably lead to a less than ideal process. Long preparation is the key to a successful succession plan.

*Originally published by the Manila Bulletin, C-4, Sunday, September 25, 2016. Written by Ruben Anlacan, Jr. (President, BusinessCoach, Inc.) All rights reserved. May not be reproduced or copied without express written permission of the copyright holders.