Pretty much everyone seems to agree that succession planning is a good thing. After all, it increases the possibility that you will have competent candidates for top jobs, who already know your company and its culture. That’s a good thing, because most research indicates that insiders make more effective CEOs than outsiders.
That’s why an article like Tim Gould’s HRMorning piece, “Succession planning: An outline for kick-starting this critical process,” can be really helpful. He suggests two ways that a good succession plan can help your company.
* “Strengthen your talent pool. The process of identifying high (and low) performers and possible gaps in your employees’ skillsets gives companies an opportunity to make adjustments before they’re left in the lurch when a key team member departs.
* Make better use of the talent you’ve got. By definition, succession planning includes an employee development component.”
This is a great piece, with lots of helpful advice. But with all the good advice, there are some things that trip my switch. They apply to this piece, but also to almost every “succession planning” article I read.
Forget the stable old days. I really don’t need to know that once upon a time people joined a company when they left school and stayed until they retired. In the light of selective memory, those days may look like practically perfect, but they weren’t. They weren’t any better than today, just different.
Besides, those days are long gone. For many in the workforce, they’re more history than memory.
And let’s quit talking about succession planning as if it were an engineering project. Succession planning is more like gardening than it is like engineering. Have a general idea of what you’re looking for, but then let the people grow. They’ll do fine and so will you.
One more thing. Predicting the future and creating a succession plan to line up leaders for it is a fool’s errand. We know the future will be different but we don’t know how. That’s the bad news. The good news is that if you raise up good leaders, they’ll figure out what to do.
