Succession Management: Is It All That It Is Cracked Up To Be?

The fall travel season has started.  I find myself at the Toronto airport with a little bit of time to post.  I have been reading Peter Cappelli's book "Talent On Demand".  It is well worth reading.  It gives a nice historical perspective on why we have the talent management practices we have today and why the assumptions that underlie those practices have changed significantly, leaving conventional wisdom wrong in many cases.  I found one particular passage around succession management extremely illuminating:

"We do succession planning to an unbelievable degree.  But once we do it, we don't use it.  Never have we received a senior vacancy and looked at the succession plan.  It's almost done as just another tick in the HR box"

One reason that succession plans do not work, at least for executive jobs, is that the events that trigger them --usually dismissal-- signal that the organization wants to move in a different direction with the next hire:  "We do not want someone like the last guy."  And succession planning is designed to produce candidates who look more or less exactly like that last guy...

Does that ring true for your organization?  I imagine that it would for most HR professionals.  Succession plans that are tied to individual characteristics or that do not change as the organization direction changes are not particularly valuable.  Like much of talent management, the use of succession management software is only as good what goes into it.  If you do not define the right characteristics for key positions (and adjust them regularly as the organization evolves) or do not develop broader talent pools that can be slotted into multiple critical roles, then a lot of time and effort can be spent on succession management with little results to show for it.

What do you think?  Is succession management worth the effort?  Is it better to not plan and fill needs as they emerge with a talent pool made of internal and external candidates?

Comments

[Meg Bear]

very good point. I think that the act of Succession Planning is important not just for actual succession but also for leadership development. I agree that in the case of "needing a change" looking external will often be the path taken but for building a stronger bench and developing leaders the practice of Succession Planning does provide value to an organization.

[Lexy Martin]

Good blog.
Doing our CedarCrestone HR Systems survey data analysis this year, I've come across a very interesting set of findings when I look at statistical significance.

Organizations with talent management have higher sales growth than those without. Organizations with competency management continue to show the highest sales growth. The one major TM application where sales growth is lowest is succession planning.

That was so interesting, that I dug deeper and found:
Those that have succession planning focused at top management have the lowest sales growth and those that focus succession planning at "all employees" have the highest.

No succession planning, with application support, at all would be better than just focusing on top management. Focusing on succession management means that organizations have had to deal with competencies and have truly institutionalized the process and the thinking, in my mind.
We'll present these findings at HR Technology next month. www.HRTechnologyConference.com

[Sean Conrad]

If done well, succession planning is well worth the effort. But as you said, it can’t be effective if you’re just identifying candidates to replace an individual. To be successful, organizations need to take a step back and identify the key skills they need, across the organization, to execute on their strategic plan today, and over the next three to five years. The succession plan should then focus on assessing and developing those key skills in the company’s high performers.

Succession planning is only successful when an organization proactively develops employees to fill important roles in the future. Developing employees to fill key roles not only builds bench strength for the organization, but it provides value to high performers, making it more likely that you can retain them. That’s what talent pools are all about - or at least should be. For more info on talent pools, I’d recommend checking out the book Effective Succession Planning by William J. Rothwell.

[Michael Brandt]

Jim,

I think the whole way companies look at succession planning is turning. With technology making the process much easier, companies are looking at a much broader application with developmental planning against every employee. One of our customers Lion Nathan has built an amazing culture around how they do developmental/succession planning against future potential with every employee all the way to the guy who does deliveries. The employee value proposition for Lion Nathan is way up there. Have a read around the web for Bob Barbour of Lion Nathan in Australia. Great history around what they have done over the past 8 years that they have gone online with HCM.

Mike Brandt
Softscape