Succession Planning; Securing Future Excellence
- Zoran Vidovic
- Dec 10, 2024
- 6 min read
How do we preserve our company's know-how? How do we maintain the level of ingenuity and excellence? How do we envision the company's future?
We accomplish all of that with help from our employees, who understand and align with our company's mission and vision but maintain their character and personality that drives their curiosity and creativeness with a clear vision of growth and development.
Let's look into it.
What is succession planning?
Cambridge Dictionary defines succession as: "a process in which someone automatically takes an official position or job after someone else."
Succession planning is the process of aligning potential candidates with the progression to the next position.
It is an important process in identifying, motivating, and developing our employees for promotion.
It helps the company and the employees:
The company identifies strict rules for promotion with a clear understanding of the progression process and required skills for the candidates.
Employees receive clear expectations and instructions in complying with the progression standard.
The process allows for transparent career progression when clear and measurable results are its main drive. It then serves as a check and balance process with little, or no room, for misunderstanding, misalignment, and abuse of the process.
This then leaves no room for misunderstanding or resentment if the whole process is made transparent and adhered to by everyone.
Why should we create it?
Having people progress from one position to another, in most cases a higher position, is a very important and delicate process. If done right, it will enrich employees and the company, but if done wrong, then it leads on a path of resentment and toxic company culture.
Let's look at the advantages of succession planning:
It gives employees something to strive and aim for, as it provides opportunities and direction for self-development and growth within the company.
We are going to have different kind of people working for us. Some might be very competitive and ambitious. Others might be prone to risk and impatient. We can also have employees who are content with where they are, as they love consistency and predictability and dislike change and uncertainty.
Either way, we will need to progress as an organization with change and development being a rule and not an exception.
To achieve this we will need to balance and align various personalities and personal goals with the company's mission and vision.
It creates a platform for the company to keep the high performers who strive to self-develop and achieve more, personally and professionally.
It also allows for new employees to join the team and align with the opportunities for improvement, growth, and development.
This is important as it prevents uninterested, unmotivated, and unambitious employees from clogging the development pipeline for the rest of the employees and the company.
Does it mean we need to force the promotion on employees who are not looking to get promoted? No, but it does highlight growth opportunities, not necessarily with promotion, but perhaps by lateral movement to a different position within the same level.
It testifies to the company's dedication to empowering and motivating their employees by providing equal opportunities for development and growth.
When a company designs a succession planning process that is transparent and equitable, it then incites trust and ignites the desire for development and growth within its employees.
It then makes the employees feel safe and respected as they are convinced of the deeper purpose of the company, expanding even beyond profit.
It minimizes, and even prevents, favoritism, nepotism, and position trading from establishing as a norm.
This process allows for a clear understanding and adherence to the requirements for advancing within the company, which minimizes the possibility of abuse.
This is really important as, combined with a well-designed and controlled performance review and feedback process, this serves as an additional tool in identifying the need for growth and development and aligning it with company needs, by communicating it clearly and on time.
How do we create it?
We have already identified all qualifications needed for each position, along with job descriptions. This then becomes a base for the succession planning.
What qualification is needed for a higher position?
Does the higher position require higher education? If so, why, and how much higher than the one for the lower position?
It is important to be realistic about this requirement, as we might find ourselves backpedaling and reverting to the old requirement, depending on the supply and demand.
- Our current employee force does not have the required level of education for this position.
This can put us in an unfavorable position as we might be forced to look for potential candidates outside of our employees, due to unrealistic expectations.
This then waters down our culture, and it might expose us to friction between new and existing employees and resentment from our existing employees, due to not being considered for the promotion.
- The new requirement for an advanced level of education raises the compensation package for the position.
We might increase compensation expectations with this change, which could trigger a ripple effect up the hierarchy.
This change might narrow the gap between this position and the next position, inciting the employees, higher up, to ask for a compensation adjustment.
What experience and skill set are needed for a higher position?
This could range from requiring certain experience and seniority in the lower position to additional experience and skills that could be substituted by training and certification.
This needs to be a realistic requirement not to fall short of the candidates with complementing abilities and level of education, but lacking some experience.
What profile of employees are we looking to promote, in anticipation of further development and promotion?
This is probably the most important aspect of the process, as we should not only focus on certification, education, and experience, although those are easily measured and audited segments.
We need to paint a good picture about the other requirements, such as teamwork, collaboration, communication, and alignment with the company's standard, mission, and vision.
All of which should be encapsulated in our performance review and feedback process, which needs to go hand in hand with our succession planning process.
We might have employees excelling in educational background and experience, but their ability to connect with the company's mission and vision, as well as the rest of the team, is limited. In this case, we need to consider opportunities for growth and development prior to considering the promotion, as these employees are not at the required level for it.
What to consider?
Succession planning needs to serve as a platform for identifying the opportunities for advancement for the employees, and to identify the best candidates for each position for the employer.
This will produce results only if it is designed and executed correctly. We need to take into consideration the possibility of the process being abused or watered down by leaders who are not interested in it, do not understand it, or are intentionally not adhering to it for personal interests.
We need to establish a monitoring process that helps police it and prevents the abuse of the process.
There could be different reasons for the abuse:
Intentionally
The process is abused on purpose with intent to discredit certain employees, or to favor an employee.
Unintentionally
The process is not followed due to not understanding or misunderstanding it.
Either way, we need to monitor the process and protect it from misunderstanding or abuse. We can achieve this by providing regular training for the managers involved as well as auditing the process.
This process is critical for company growth and the development of a company culture that supports idea incubation, constructive discussions, idea exchange, collaboration, teamwork, and personal development.
All of that is important to maintain the required level of ingenuity and excellence, which will take the company on a path of success, while preserving the integrity and character of each employee.
Both the succession planning and performance review and feedback processes are critical processes that should not be tainted by personal opinions and favoritism.
Something that is harder said than done, as each process is monitored and executed by different leaders with different personal beliefs and perceptions of the process.
This is why they need to be flagged as critical and considered as such with a monitoring process in place that identifies, investigates, and sanctions abuse reciprocal to its intent.
