Leadership Succession Planning
Proactively identifying and developing new leaders to succeed current ones should be the basic goal for every organization. At its best, it’s proactive and methodical investment in building a pipeline of leaders within an organization and identifying strong external candidates, in order that when transitions are necessary, leaders in the least levels are ready to perform. Succession planning is very vital for any organizations success and leadership needs to evolve in the future identification of leaders. Good organizations always make planning towards grooming next level leaders as the future may be uncertain. Planning helps to develop leaders more effectively through structured process.
Ways to develop leadership succession planning.
Involving senior leadership
There should be serious discussions and consensus between top leadership and the human resources to develop very strong second level
leadership succession planning through structured strategies. This team should put a structured approach in place to develop a plan and implement it to ensure that expectations are set with timelines. The department responsible should be held accountable so that brand new leaders are groomed for the organization.
Mapping of visionary approach for future leadership teams
It is vital to understand what type of leadership qualities we need to groom to achieve organizations strategy. With this crystal clear understanding the organization can move forward and groom their next level leaders accordingly in order to meet their future needs.
Developing future leaders
It is vital that organizations identify the next level future leaders work on their shortcomings and develop concrete plans to train and groom their weakness. This way the future leader’s development areas can be chiselled and refined to excel as future leader for the organization.
Hiring talents from outside
Every organization cannot fill talented leaders from within the organization so effective and planned design should be formed to hire talented leaders from outside the organization to fill in the gap. Effective hiring and planned on-boarding practices should be put in place to integrate new leaders into the organization. These new leaders should be nicely handled with expectations setting done else they tend to move out, if proper focus is not put on their roles in the organization.
Monitoring and improve the process of developing leaders
Leaders being groomed internally within the organizations should go through detailed assessments to clear it every step. Stepwise
grooming of leaders should be followed wherein their improvement should be tracked, measured and feedback given regularly to them. Initiative should be also taken to improve the curriculum on developing leaders by taking regular feedbacks for all the trainees. Learning is always 360 degree and everyone learns from everyone at all times. If the learning stops then life either ends or becomes boring so learning should never stop. One should always reinvent the learning cycle.
Does the Leadership succession plan fail and why?
Every company has various ways to approach to succession planning. … However, they’re often faced with the similar issues. A lack of insights into the skills of employees, existing biases towards set of people, and the absence of transparency often leads to poor succession planning and talent pool scarcity.
There are various reason for which the succession plan fails and few are furnished below with a brief synopsis.
Succession Plans Are for Finding Successors Regardless of Circumstances
Many companies develop succession plans to find replacements in case an employee decides to leave them. However, the right approach is to always have a pool of candidates/successors available for replacement immediately. This is a farsighted approach that not only helps you to make variations according to your own forecasting, but also allows you stay ready for sudden changes outside of your control.
Succession plans should always be developed while keeping business continuity in mind and not stop gap arrangement. They help find the accurate replacement for a job or position who can not only do the job—but do it better,if not bad.
Reactive Succession approach
Businesses that develop reactionary succession plans often face failure because they rush, and in the process, end up overlooking several aspects of this important exercise for an organization. You should not start to progress a succession plan when an employee is about to retire, is not well, or has resigned. The organizations should be always be one step forward in their approach.
Successful succession plans require long-term planning, career pathing, and testing to spot the successors who want the role and are qualified for it. When you create a succession plan in response to an occurrence, you’ll probably forget to take the necessary precautions.
Succession Plans Are Considered Independent
Many businesses view succession planning as a distinct activity. As a result, even excellent succession plans can have negative results when the successor does not perform.
The problem arises because of two reasons. One is that succession planning is misunderstood as an HR job when it is actually more. While HR finalizes a succession plan, the initial planning, tests, and development is and will be the responsibility of every department.
Secondly, internal training, development, and coaching programmes are not connected to succession plans. You cannot consider a successor and leave him on his own to develop his skills for the role. The company must provide the successor with possibilities for training and development. So, the department responsible for the function as well as the training & development department should work together to build succession plans.
Thus overall, succession planning is an important part of the talent management process It provides a way to spot important roles, people with the proper skills and positions which will need filling during a short space of your time. It also provides a way to pull down the costs of recruitment helping the organisations to manage recruitment in-house.
