“In organizational development, management succession planning is the process of identifying and preparing suitable employees through mentoring, training and job rotation, to replace key players—such as the chief executive officer (CEO)—within an organization as their terms expire,” according to Wikipedia.org.
Any organization that wants to be able and continue to move forward and grow in the face of any type of uncertainty regarding management—such as being promoted or leaving the company—will benefit from management succession planning.
By using management succession planning, there will be people in the organization ready to step into the higher-up roles and take over if something does happen.
When I think about management succession planning, I think about an organization that has actually taken to heart the well-being of the company itself. The management team has realized the company is bigger than the people in it, so they need to protect their assets by continuing operations.
I also think of an organization that values its employees enough to grow and develop them so they can move up the ladder, because when you look at management succession planning, it feeds into helping create employees’ career paths as well.
Common Mistakes
The biggest mistake employers make is that they don’t do management succession planning. Most companies don’t have true succession plans in place. Now, they may have thought about which employee they would move up to take someone’s place, but they don’t do anything to prepare those people for when it’s actually time to move up.
And then somebody gets another job or gets promoted to a different position and the company is basically left in a defensive mode with trying to fill that person’s shoes and then giving the new person a workload they weren’t really prepared to take on.
One of the other mistakes companies make when they do put management succession planning in place is they don’t adequately prepare the person who is going to take over when a manager leaves, moves positions, etc. Sometimes the company doesn’t even ask the person if they’re interested, and then the time comes for the move and the employee doesn’t want to take the position.
It’s important to have a good program in place and to prepare the succeeding employee to step into the manager’s shoes.
Finding the Right Employee
There are a couple things employers can do if they want to set up an effective management succession plan.
- Identify What an Employee Wants to Do—You need to speak with the employee to determine the career path they’re on and if they would be interested in a management position.
For example, if you have a Controller who you want to groom for the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) position and you have an accountant who you want to succeed the Controller, you need to figure out if that accountant would want to be a Controller. He may not want to be. He may be perfectly happy being an accountant.
So you definitely have to identify what the employee’s desires are in order to get a good fit.
- Do an Accurate Assessment—You need to accurately assess each of the succeeding employees to make sure their skill level is right for the position, because if your Controller doesn’t have the ability to work as CFO or your accountant is not sophisticated enough in his skill level to slide into a Controller position, you have a gap.
The best way to find the right employees is to do a real job analysis on each of the positions to identify the true competencies that are required. This is more than just the knowledge, skills and abilities (KSA) identified when writing a job description, but the true competencies developed through experience on the job.
Then you can take a look at the skills in your organization and find who has the required competencies or, if you don’t have anyone with the required skills, figure out what the company can do to develop them.