Succession planning is vital to ensure the ongoing success of your company. It’s a strategy for identifying and developing future leaders so that you’re able to effectively address the inevitable changes that occur when employees resign, retire, are let go, get sick or die.
Having one in place will help to make sure that you’re prepared for all eventualities by identifying and training high-potential workers for advancement into key roles.
If you want to guarantee the long term success of your organisation, make sure you check out the following 7 steps that you and your team should take in order to ensure you’re able to put a successful succession plan in place.
Identify The Important Positions In Your Organisation
As the first step in the succession planning process, you’ll need to identify the current roles that are fundamental to the success of your company. Doing so will help you get a better understanding of the issues or challenges that you will be faced with if these positions are not filled, and how it can be detrimental to your business’s success.
If you do this step right, you’ll be able to better identify the suitable successors for these critical roles. It will also allow you to make the necessary arrangements for training or development that may be required to ensure that the successor can live up to the responsibilities involved.
Keep Your Options Open
While your first logical choice might be to appoint a successor who’s next in terms of seniority, remember to keep a lookout for employees who display the skills required to thrive in the relevant role.
Putting rigid requirements on who should be eligible to take on the role might cause you to lose out on existing potential within your company, which can be a determining factor for your long term success.
Make Your Vision Clear
Your succession plan is redundant if your team is not on board with it. Share the objectives of your succession plan with your potential managers and include them in decision-making processes. This will allow them to develop the necessary planning and leadership skills and be prepared to take on their new roles when the time comes.
Be Proactive
Understand that it can take time to find a suitable candidate for a role, so form some strategies that will help you keep track of the performance of your peak performers. Give regular feedback to your team and keep a close eye on who is taking it on. Keeping track and jotting down their specific achievements, skills and strengths whenever you notice them is a good practice that will give you something to refer to in the event of a performance appraisal.
Provide Training
Succession planning will give you a clear picture of the most important skills required for your organisation to function and thrive. Focus on providing relevant training to your team. This way you can help them develop new skills while harnessing their existing ones. This will allow potential successors to step into new roles smoothly, with appropriate knowledge and skills at hand.
Give It A Go
How else will you know if your succession plan will work effectively? A good time to put it to the test is when one of your leaders is away from the work. This will give you insights on how prepared your potential successor is to take on the role while giving them a chance to experience the new position they are working towards.
Develop A Hiring Strategy
Now that you have established which internal employees will be successors for key roles, you’d be able to identify the talent gaps within your organisation. Use this information to develop a hiring strategy when you look for relevant candidates from the talent pool.
Succession planning is a methodological approach to ensuring your company’s success in the years to come. It addresses unforeseen and unavoidable circumstances so you can formulate a strategy to ensure ongoing success. Keep these tips in mind to make the most of your efforts so that both the processes of strategizing and transitioning happen in the most efficient manner.
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