Tips to Start Your Succession Planning

by Josh Biggs in Tips on 5th January 2021


Succession planning is when organizations identify and develop young talents to replace an old leader when they retire, leave, or die. They have to leave nothing else behind and risk losing quality employees to the competition. In this way, your company’s leaders can identify the best employees in your company and create this dynamic “talent pool” of core competencies, with which other managers prepare these high-performing employees for future roles. Here are the top five tips for starting your succession planning.

1. Reduce and Automate Costs


Paper-based processes, fragmented, and inconsistency are characteristic of today’s succession planning efforts. Traditionally, corporate and HR managers manually spent weeks or months in different parts of the organization to obtain the information needed to create a roster and pool of successors and nominees for specific job positions. This slow, inefficient, and expensive process is still common today.

Beginning with a paper-based, manual, systematic, and technology-based process to effectively change succession planning, CEOs should focus on building a strong foundation supported by strong management.

Process and Program Foundation

  • Establish a dedicated management function with an executive leader or a CEO-sponsored council.
  • Understand the effects of change with a focus on managers and employees. 
  • Determine the initial scope.
  • Define a central succession process with crucial components and functions at each stage of the process.
  • Programs aligned with broader business strategy
  • Define technology-independent processes

Technological Foundation

  • Easy to use for managers and employees
  • Support and activation of key processes
  • Must integrate development and learning 
  • Other business processes should find it easy to link with it, specifically performance management.
  • Must be configurable and flexible to meet specific requirements.
  • Important data and information should be centralized and integrated

2.  Establishing Succession Planning as a permanent Process

Many CEOs still see succession planning as an option plan designed to appoint senior executives’ successors in a disaster. Only a few top companies are planning their succession on crucial roles within the company. Succession planning beyond the top management level is essential in retaining high-level players at all organization levels. It minimizes the risk of premature brain drain for high-quality positions.

The key to the expansion of succession planning is providing career development plans to employees. Not only can existing employees reduce the effects of talent shortages, but they can also achieve tangible and significant cost savings.

3. Establishment of Dynamic Talent Pools

Centralized talent pools give CEOs a global view of their talent stream and the entire organizational bank’s strengths. They are a mechanism to make sure that the organization’s future human resource planning is appropriate, thus ensuring continuity and reducing risk. To be effective, the talent pool needs to be dynamic. For instance, if an employee is hired, you should automatically remove that person from the current succession group

An essential element in reaching the talent pool is an in-depth talent search. A talent pool is not great if managers are unable to identify quickly, track, update, and locate potential successors. Those pools should value succession planning by skills, development plans, aligning employee reviews, and learning programs. Supported by powerful analytics and reporting capabilities, it specifically helps CEOs plan future staffing requirements and more objective decisions.

4. Promoting Talent Mobility

Talent Mobility is an organizational process to move talent from one role to another. It is the process that enables the higher hierarchy to move talents when it is required and where it is necessary. Its features are:


• A mechanism to attract and retain potential and high-performing talent
• A hiring philosophy that favors internal hiring over external hiring.
• A method for matching personal and organizational needs through development.
• A business strategy that facilitates the flexibility and resilience of the organization
• A continuous and proactive approach to succession planning.

5. Integration of succession planning with end-to-end business processes

Succession planning relies on other talent figures and processes, particularly assessment, that provide a foundation for performance and ability. Succession planning requires personal data and input. Outcomes include nominee pools, succession groups, learning/development plans, and reports. A single core technology platform is needed to centralize information and information to facilitate the integration required for succession planning.

Also, a single technology platform promotes the relationship between learning and professional development, and succession planning. Upon completing these processes, candidates who are not promotion-ready can be assigned a detailed development plan that will help them improve the skills and abilities required for the new positions. One can configure educational paths and specific courses for employees to facilitate their professional development. Analysis and reporting are critical to CEO success in implementing strategies and managing employee resources that support corporate goals and initiatives.

Categories: Tips

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