Succession Planning and Employee Development is often a double edge sword.  When developing employees for succession, management will often be concerned about 2 key areas:

• Will the potential successor be ready when I need him?
• What if there’s no vacant position when the successor is ready?

These are among the key questions asked whenever there’s a project to embark on development of successors or high potentials.  Let me answer a question with a question - Is concern No.2 a real concern?

Yes and No.  Concern No.2 will only be a real concern if an organization is focused only on development of one successor per position.  Let me try to explain this with examples.  Let’s assume that we’re working of succession planning for Head of Sales Divsion, the development plan went so well that he was ready in 2 years when the incumbent has neither planned to retire no resigned.  What will the ready successor most likely do?  Yes! most of you would have guessed it correctly - he will leave for a readily vacant role in another organization (maybe even the competitor).  But should we be worried?

We should only be worried if:

• The ready successor is a much better performer than the incumbent.  If that was the case, what’s stopping the management from promoting the incumbent into the position and create an advisory role for the incumbent?  Afterall, the incumbent knowledge and industry experience may be valuable for the organization.  It may even be a good option to turn the incumbent into an organization mentoring resource or coach.  If the incumbent is clearly a better person to do the job than the identified successor, then wouldn’t we still be confident enough to beat the competitor?
• If the incumbent is likely to leave in the next 1 year and there are no successors besides for the potential who has left.  This is an unlikely scenario to happen if it was communicated clearly to the potential successor on the possible timeline for transition.  Also, in this scenario, it represents a flaw in the succession planning.  There should be more than one successor identified (with varied level of readiness) for every position.  This would keep the organization immune from effects of high potentials leaving.

The key I’d like to highlight here is the importance of developing more than one successor per position and not to be overly concerned about attrition due to over-development.  It’s a good headache to have afterall.  As what I’d always say - If we have sufficient good people around, don’t worry to build a reputation as the Net Talent Exporter.  That reputation will help us recruit better employees too!

Finally, I’ll quote an interesting phrase that I heard recently.  “We’ve developed people who has left, this is a frustration that will continue; but that shouldn’t stop us from continuing to develop talents!”  So keep focusing on conern No.1 above and forget about concern No.2 - It’s not even a concern!

If any non-HR professionals are still not convinced of this strategy?  Ask yourself:

• Why do we often purchase slightly more inventories of raw materials and manufacture slightly more than the orders we get?
• Why don’t banks take just enough deposits as there are loans disbursed?
• Why don’t a football team just develop 22 players since you’d only need 11 players and 11 “successors”?

If all the aboved can be understood, why not apply it to organization succession planning?

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Tags: employee loyalty, hr, Succession Planning, talent management

This entry was posted by Clayton J.C Tan on Saturday, January 30th, 2010 at 11:43 am and is filed under Human Resources, Leadership & Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.