Creating A Successful Succession Plan

Businesses rely on talented people ready to move into key positions when the current occupants leave. Even the most successful employers can fall off quickly if they don’t have a solid succession plan in place.

Succession planning is a strategy for identifying and developing future leaders at your company for major roles at all levels. It helps prepare your business for all contingencies by arranging high-potential workers for advancement.

Here are some tips for launching the succession planning process at your company:

Take Charge with a Plan

There will be times when you’ll know well in advance if a hard-to-replace team member is going to leave the company — a planned retirement, for example. There are also other times you will be caught off-guard by a sudden and potentially problematic employee departure. That’s why you need a plan sooner rather than later.

Think about all the key roles on your team and answer these two questions:

• If the person currently in X position left, how would that affect business operations?



• What’s the day-to-day impact of X’s position on our business or department?

Find Succession Candidates

Once you have an understanding about the ripple effect that the departure of certain employees might cause, choose team members who could potentially step into those positions.

Ask yourself:

• If we were to hire for X position internally, which employees would be the strongest candidates for stepping into this role?

• Would those candidates need training? And, if so, what type?

The obvious successor to a role may be the person who is immediately next in line in the organizational chart, but you shouldn’t discount other promising employees. Look for people who embody the ideal skills to thrive in higher positions, regardless of their current title.

It is important to not just assume you know how people on your team view their career goals. You may have certain team members in mind for senior management roles, but you don’t know if they’ll even be interested in the idea once it’s presented to them. If you haven’t already, talk to your employees about how they view their professional future before making your succession choices.

Communicate to Your Employees

Schedule private meetings and explain to each protege that they’re being considered for positions of increasing importance. Establish an understanding that there are no guarantees, and that the situation can change due to circumstances encountered by either the business or the succession candidates themselves.

Step Up Your Professional Development Efforts

As a good business owner, you have already been investing in the professional development of those you are choosing to select as your succession choices. This means that preparation needs to be ramped up.

Job rotation is an effective way to help your candidates gain additional knowledge and experience. Connecting them with mentors can boost their abilities in the critical area of soft skills: The best leaders have strong communication skills, as well as refined interpersonal abilities like empathy and diplomacy.

Test a Trial Run of Your Succession Plan

Don’t wait until there’s a crisis to test whether an employee has the proper skillset to assume a more advanced role. You can provide short-term experience and trials when a potential successor assumes some responsibilities of a manager who’s taking a vacation.

The employee will gain valuable experience and appreciate the opportunity to shine while you assess where that person might need some additional training and development.

Incorporate Your Succession Plan into Your Hiring Strategy

Once you’ve completely identified employees as successors for critical roles in your business, take note of any talent gaps they would leave behind if tapped. This can help you identify where to focus your future recruiting efforts.

Begin to Think About Your Own Successor

When making a succession plan for your organization, it is important to keep in mind that your own role will someday require backfilling. Maybe you’ll decide to take advantage of a new opportunity, or you’ll put in your time and retire from the workforce. Then you should ask yourself: “which employee could step into my shoes one day?” Upon finding that answer, then what can you do, starting now, to help that person prepare for the transition?

The members of your workforce aren’t fixed assets, and changes in your team’s lineup are inevitable. You may not always be able to predict a valued employee’s departure from the firm, but through effective succession planning, you can pave the way for your business to be successful even after it is out of your hands. 

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