A Brighter Way
A Brighter Way
When you mention the topic of succession planning to your management team, you might get a blank stare, a defensive response or a look of confusion. Since succession planning can mean different things to different people, here’s how it is most commonly defined.
Succession planning enables an organization to identify talented employees and provide them with education and tools to grow into a future higher level responsibility. Succession planning brings your organization the bench strength it needs to fill key roles.
Succession planning doesn’t occur organically – it’s something you have to proactively plan and manage, much as you do your recruiting process. Without succession planning, you’re maintaining your staff at its current levels and not planning for the future. But where do you start? Try doing this exercise.
Imagine you’re going to build an accounting firm from scratch today. Let’s make it a Top 100 regional firm with multiple locations. What services and people will you need to make your firm successful? Perhaps you would provide audit, tax, accounting, payroll and reviews and comps, for example. As you start piecing together the services, one of the first key roles will be the need to manage the people providing these services. Therefore, you’ll need a manager of tax, audit, accounting, etc. You begin to identify all of the key roles right down to the receptionist.
Once you’ve identified the key roles within your firm, prioritize and differentiate them. What jobs are essential? Which are not? Here in Ohio, we have a lot of snow, and many of our communities issue Snow Emergencies from Level 1 to Level 3. When a Level 3 Snow Emergency is issued, companies and often government agencies will announce only essential employees must report to work. Who are your essential employees who fill those key roles?
After you’ve identified the key roles within your firm, the second step in developing tomorrow’s leaders is assessing the people who are part of your organization. This means understanding their skills, abilities, knowledge and experience. Your performance evaluation process will help gather this information as well as assess the employee’s potential.
From this information, you can begin to align key roles with individual names within your organization. Succession planning means developing employees for higher level and broader responsibility, and developing a time frame to reach the positions you need.
This involves identifying as many realistic candidates as possible for the positions you have. What education, training and experience can you provide to help them reach the next level? What is a realistic time frame to reach it? For example if you identify five people who could potentially become your next director, how long will it take to develop them?
Another part of your succession planning process is determining a realistic timeline to allow the tools and training to come to fruition. You may not always be in a position to wait for future leaders to develop. In that case, you may have to go outside your firm to acquire the talent to fill a key role. Making this determination is just part of managing the development of your team.
Your firm should constantly develop the talent in its pipeline and not allow your team members to become stagnant in their knowledge and skills. With a properly developed succession plan, you’ll have a winning team in place for many years to come.
Note: This content is accurate as of the date published and is subject to change. Please seek professional advice before acting on any matter contained in this article.
