What is succession planning?
August 7, 2008
With all the talk about ‘the war for talent’ and the lack of leadership and management skills in the UK labour force, there’s quite an emphasis within the HR community on succession planning at the moment. I’ve done a little bit of digging into what this exactly means as it’s a phrase that’s used a lot but the exact purpose and meaning isn’t always completely clear, and I think this is because career development as an idea has evolved and developed in recent decades. This is due to many things including the changing nature of business in a now global environment and the increase in women on the ‘career ladder’ instead of working up to the time when family commitments take over and then dropping out of the labour market.
The CIPD describes succession planning as ‘identifying future potential leaders to fill key positions’. Three key problems with this idea come immediately to mind:
- Firstly, with the rapid pace of change in today’s business environment, it’s sometimes impossible to predict what senior positions will be available in the future, so it’s difficult to identify potential and then nurture it.
- Secondly, the idea of a ‘career’ as a succession of jobs in the one company or even one industry is completely outdated. A few weeks ago I was talking about ‘career changers’ going into the teaching profession and there’s a lot more movement between different industries and jobs now than in the past. Now you hear about ‘protean careers’ – i.e. people having more than one different career in their lives, and ‘portfolio careers’ – i.e. the people who manage a number of different roles within the one career (consultancy and teaching together, for example). And these types of careers are now more of a life choice rather than a need. So with these ideas in mind, there are fewer employees willing to stay in a company for the long term awaiting a succession of promotions as there would have been a number of years ago.
- Thirdly, the structure of organisations has changed in many places, and we now see flatter, or sometimes ‘matrix’ structures where the opportunities for progression in the traditional sense are few and far between.
So succession planning has become more of a two-way relationship. As well as attempting to consider the business needs of the future, employers need to ensure they are meeting the career expectations of those they are intending to develop into the leaders of the future, at a quick enough pace, otherwise all their good work may be wasted when the employees go off to succeed a leader in another company. Another area to be aware of is the growing acceptance that employees have family lives, and will assert their rights to these lives more now than ever. So succession planning needs to be flexible to individuals’ needs for a work-life balance and a family-friendly career.
So, after thinking about the definition of succession planning, it seems that the practice is much more complicated than you would think, and there seems to be a lot than can go wrong. However it is an important practice to think about. Whilst the labour market looks set to grow due to increasing unemployment, this doesn’t mean that the employees left behind deserve less attention and development, nor that companies should start recruiting all their leaders from outside of the company just because there is more availability of candidates. However on the other hand, some companies tend to promote from within simply because an individual has been with the organisation a long time or has shown favourable traits such as commitment and loyalty, but if this is the case across the board there is a danger of ending up with a senior team that has not had enough developmental attention or that has been poorly selected for the positions.
Tomorrow I’ll look at how companies can carry out effective succession planning within the constraints and difficulties of today’s business environment.
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