PostHow about professional development?
You should identify the kind of training your hand-picked super-stars still need next. Do you want them to attend specialized courses to gain the industry knowledge? Should they rotate jobs, so they learn every aspect of your business? Or perhaps you should pair them up with mentors to boost their communication and interpersonal abilities?
Whatever training you identify as most crucial, don’t forget to incorporate on-the-job training. Have your potential successors take over the responsibilities of a manager who is takin a vacation. After all, how else are you going to pin-point if they need additional training?
Once you have lined up your talent for the key positions in your organization, it is time to think about potential gaps they will leave behind. Perhaps it is a good time to start focusing on your future recruiting efforts as part of your hiring strategy?
Overcoming obstacles
If your organization accepts your succession planning gracefully, consider yourself lucky. More often than not there will be resistance to change, inconsistent performance management, lack of top management support, or all of the above and then some. Before you roll out an all-in across-the-board succession planning program, consider potential obstacles, and how you are going to overcome them.
For the lack of executive support, you should find at least one top manager to advocate for the succession planning program. Find out what it is that makes your bosses uneasy. Is it the concern that they will lose the already established talent? Or is it because they are worried about lost productivity? Whatever it is, find the source of their skepticism and neutralize it with the facts and proactive steps that your are going to take to eliminate the potential issues that the succession planning program might bring.
In case of resistance to change, try starting small, perhaps at the very top and create a wonderful success story to build credibility. Oftentimes, there is also management resistance to letting go of their best performers. The best way to approach and overcome this obstacle is to foster a culture of recognition and celebration of keeping the talent within the organization wherever it may migrate.
If your company doesn’t have a good transparent performance management system in place, then forget succession planning. You need to focus on correcting your employee development efforts and evaluate them on a continuous basis.
Other obstacles might be lack of time, tendencies to support and praise knowledge hoarding, rather than knowledge sharing, tall hierarchical organization that doesn’t allow for cross-functional training, and many more.
The bottom line is that you won’t always be able to predict when your best talent is going to leave you, but you can ensure your business continuity through effective succession planning.
Yours Truly,
The Wow HR Team
