By Amy Townson

One of my passions is helping the next generation of leaders prepare to take the reins. This may be helping students or interns prepare to enter the workforce or helping long-term employees take their careers to the next level. Part of this includes successful succession planning for the organization.

What is Succession Planning

Succession Planning provides an organizational framework for the succession of key roles to ensure continuity of long-term business operations. Who are tomorrow’s leaders? Are they ready for these roles? With succession planning, you are looking forward and preparing for your organization’s future.

What Should You Consider?

You may need to look at many factors when beginning the process. The only right answers here are those that will best serve your organization.

• Your Strategic Plan. A good succession plan is based on your organization’s strategy. You can’t conduct succession planning if you don’t know where you are going as an organization. Succession planning should help prepare the organization for where it will be in the future. As a result, it should be based on the organization’s strategic plan.
• The Supply Chain.  We know that recent events have disrupted many supply chains. In today’s global economy, events across the world could impact your organization. How might this affect your organization’s future? Do you rely on hardware and physical products? Does your organization route and connect suppliers with customers?
• Your Technologies. What technologies does your organization use that are becoming (or are now) outdated? Will the next generation of workers and leaders know how to use this technology? Do the workers you’ll have five years from now have the skills to maintain this technology? Should you retrain existing workers, pull in specialists, or replace this technology?
• Customer Expectations. Customers already expect to do business with us in different ways. We’ve gone from the Sears catalog to Amazon, from Blockbuster to Netflix. How will customer expectations continue to change as they interact with your organization? Is your organization ready to meet these expectations?
• The Next Wave. Is your organization ready for the next wave of technology? Your future workers are.
• Retirement. Who on your team will be eligible to retire in the next five years? What roles do they fill within your organization? What key skillsets do they hold? Do others on your team hold the same skills?
• The Next Generation. What does the next generation of workers look like? What do they expect from a work environment? Are you ready?
• Essential Roles. As you consider your organization’s challenges, you probably know what roles are critical for you. These roles may be essential for your business operations today. They may also be newly created roles. How many of these roles existed five or ten years ago? What roles might be critical for your organization five years from now?
• Your Needs. What are the upcoming challenges? Are there changes you anticipate? What mission-critical positions will be needed?

Creating Your Plan

Once you have considered your needs, you can start to create your plan. Fortunately, the process itself is straightforward. Once you identify the key positions you’ll need, you can look to determine who can fill those roles in both a short-term and long-term placement. The final tasks are easy to talk about but harder to do since you must ensure those resources are ready and have the knowledge they need to slide into the new roles.

The first step will be identifying key positions that will be needed in the short and long term. Are these new positions or existing positions that are mission critical? As the organization evolves, new leaders must be prepared to address any significant challenges or changes the organization will face. These positions may include key leadership roles, statutorily required positions, upcoming needs, and other roles that the organization considers vital. For each position, you’ll want to list some basic information:

• Name of the role
• A brief description
• The urgency of the need (and a rationale)
• The knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) needed to fill the role
• Key functions

With the key positions identified, you can start to think about who might fill these roles in the short term. Do you have staff who can fill in an interim capacity? Perhaps they can absorb key functions while the organization selects a long-term candidate. Are these individuals already cross-trained?

Next, look at the potential candidates who can take on these roles in the long term. Do you have staff who may be ready to fill roles on a long-term basis? What skills will they need for the upcoming role? Again, you’ll want to list some basic information for each:

• Candidate’s name. You may find that you don’t have potential candidates for a given role and will need to look externally for these individuals.
• The skills that are needed. What skills (from the KSAs listed for the role) does this candidate need to acquire, develop, or improve before being ready for the role?
• Professional development activities. List the tasks and activities the candidate will perform to acquire, develop, or improve the needed KSAs.
• Due Date. When will each professional development activity be completed?
• Ready when? When will the candidate likely be ready for a permanent move into this role?

The final step is to make sure you work with incumbents and potential candidates to complete professional development and knowledge transfer activities. You want to ensure they are fully prepared before you need them so the transition can be seamless.

Need help?

We all tend to focus on today, and succession planning requires you to look farther into the future. Routine projects, operational issues, and day-to-day problems sometimes take priority in our workday. However, setting aside time now can leave the organization fully prepared for tomorrow. Momentum consultants have helped organizations like yours prepare for their future through succession planning – contact us today to get started!

Written by Amy Townson

Amy is a certified project manager with over 20 years of experience and expertise in the health and human services industry, transportation, state government sector, contract management, and project management techniques. She has successfully managed over fifty unique projects and multiple portfolios of projects. In addition, Amy has provided training for state and federal clients on a variety of topics. She has strong facilitation skills with the ability to tailor messages to fit the audience’s experience level and role. Amy is a skilled leader of in-person, virtual, and combination teams.

Like Amy’s work? Check out some of her other blogs – How and When to Apologize or A Leader’s Impact on Team Culture.