Beyond the C-Suite: Succession Planning for the Rest of Us
Any Game of Thrones fan can warn you of the dangers of not taking your succession plan seriously—nobody wants to end up with Joffrey Baratheon as their CEO (except perhaps Joffrey’s mom, a key player on the Board of Directors). Even more importantly, succession plans can easily go awry with the arrival or departure of a critical character. The interrelationships that exist between leaders and supporting groups are constantly changing as the wants and needs of each group collide.
There are two certainties that organizations must face when dealing with succession planning. First, succession planning cannot be limited to the C-Suite. Rather, organizations must take a holistic look at the workforce and determine which roles or individuals are critical to future success. High performers at all levels in the organization should be included in strategic succession planning.
The second certainty is that career paths are no longer linear. Just because someone is a high performer doesn’t mean they want to join the C-Suite. High-performing, critical employees often have options—they can stay at your organization, or they can join another organization to further leverage their skills and continue to grow professionally. Because of the flexibility in the workforce, organizations must now keep tabs on the skills and abilities of potential future employees as well as current employees.
Succession planning is just one important facet of strategic workforce planning overall. What is the difference between the two? The primary goal of workforce planning is to help companies discover the skills that they will need in the future to grow and remain successful. Succession planning, and talent acquisition more broadly, is tasked with identifying people with these skills and opening the door to an appropriate career path. We know how important it is to plan for the future. But still, one of the overarching challenges facing HR is gaining executive leadership ‘buy in’ to invest in strategic people priorities. From a benchmark study conducted by The WilsonHCG Research Institute™, 85% of organizations interviewed felt that this was a significant barrier to success.
A strategic workforce plan is more than an HR initiative. A true strategic workforce planning program aligns HR with all business units and together identifies challenges and opportunities for future planning. Most importantly, a strategic plan takes into account what the company needs today and might need tomorrow. It ventures to answer the question, “What if?” The rapidly changing needs of business today also mean that a strategic plan, or even a succession plan, needs to do more than replace departing employees. Forward-thinking organizations are building talent pools and pipelines with individuals who possess skills that will be important in the future, even if they aren’t the right fit for the organization today.
In this on demand webcast, John Blowers of WilsonHCG and Andrew Gadomski of Aspen Advisors will share insights on the role data plays in creating and maintaining effective future plans. In many organizations, there is no shortage of data. The challenge for most organizations is making sense of that data—what insights can we draw? How can we visualize these insights to share them with others in a meaningful way? What business changes can we make based on these insights to improve performance? How can data-driven people decisions improve our current workforce and build the talent pool we need to plan for the future? For more on this topic, watch the on demand webcast “Achieving Sustainability and Growth through Talent & People Analytics”.