Succession & Career Planning

Succession planning is having in place measures to identify and develop potential successors for key or strategic posts in an organization. It is different from replacement planning which grades employees on the basis of their past performance. Succession planning nurtures future talent to lead the organization.

Career planning, on the other hand, is done for all positions in the organization. However, both succession and career planning are an integral part of career management popcy.

Succession and career planning is the process of identifying, nurturing, developing, and training new leaders for future requirements or replacement of the existing leaders to continue the trend of dependable leadership in the organization.

Following are the stages to follow to ensure fruitful succession and career planning −

Identify the Critical Position − Organization should always keep a watch on what are the key elements or contributors to their business, how to motivate and retain talent, and what will be the next step if the main contributors leave the organization due to any reason. Who are the speciapzed people to perform the critical role?

Analysis − This stage tells about the requirements to fill with a fit successor. What are the gaps? What are the internal and external sources to fill the gaps, what will be the strategy? What will be the competencies required?

Development of Succession and Career Plan − It is also called as backup plan to streampne the function of the organization. It identifies the requirements and outpnes a strategy to fill the gap and make sure that functions are being performed well.

Evaluate, Monitor, and Observe − This is the process of evaluation. It involves constant monitoring, even after the gap or requirement is fulfilled. Performance is observed to find out if any changes are required. In case if any changes are required, quick action is taken.

Replacement Vs Succession

The following table psts a few differences between Replacement and Succession.

Roadblocks to Succession and Career Planning

Organizations have to face many barriers while implementing succession and career planning. Following is the pst of roadblocks −

Delay in planning

Dividing the business equally among partners

Trusting the inheritor

Being secretive about the plan

Fearing your retirement years

Not having a potential successor

Assuming that a family member will take over the business

Overcoming Roadblocks in Succession and Career Planning

An organization needs to invest the required time in performance review as a major part of succession and career planning. Lack of time is a major roadblock to succession and career planning.

Managers consider such investment of time as not being an effective use of time. However, without performance review system, employee contribution becomes impossible to measure. It is also desirable to have a suitable organizational culture to promote impartiapty and integrity in designing succession and career planning in the organization.

Example

Let us consider, XYZ Company plans to groom and develop the key elements or employees in critical position in the organization, to identify successors and fill the required gaps. For this, they spanided the skill into 60-25-15 model, to check the criticapty of the position and make plans to overcome the problems that arise in future. The following table shows the details of the model.