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What is Succession Planning?
Succession planning is the deliberate preparation of future leaders within an organisation. At the departmental level, it means a manager is actively developing someone who can take over when they move on. At the organisational level, it is a strategic process for identifying high‑potential employees and preparing them for future leadership roles through targeted development from their line managers.
If your organisation has not yet considered succession planning, then consider these many advantages and benefits – they are just too significant to overlook!
What Are Organisational Benefits For Succession Planning?
For the organisation, probably the number one benefit is it helps in retaining your best employees. High‑potential ones tend to stay longer when they can see a clear career path and when they know that the organisation is investing in their growth. This sense of progression helps to keep them motivated and engaged, especially as they continue to be developed in competencies for future roles. This obviously benefits employees as well.
An obvious organisational benefit from this is that strength is being built up from within. Managers and potential managers are developed through coaching, mentoring and training, using the expertise of your established managers and senior managers. What really tops this off is it is cost-free. In many ways this should be a no-brainer, especially when you consider the potential positive impact this will have on engagement and results.
Another major benefit of succession planning is continuity, as you will now have employees readily available for promotion or when the organisation expands or a manager leaves unexpectedly. For employees this is highly motivational because it will give them direction or a possible career map that will encourage them to stay long term with your organisation.
A final benefit is that this internal development of managers will reduce the cost and risk of recruiting external candidates, and in turn will also reduce the demotivation that can happen when someone external is appointed. Also, statistically, external senior hires fail at a far higher rate. This makes sense when you consider that your internal successors already understand your organisation’s culture, customers, systems, and expectations, as well as having a vested interest in the organisation’s success. They therefore have a much better chance of succeeding over external hires.
Benefits for Managers and Employees
Managers and employees also gain significantly from succession planning. For example, it will help ensure a manager’s promotion is not held back because there is nobody to replace them. This happens more than you might think. One manager on a programme I was delivering told us he once had to wait six months for a promotion for exactly this reason.
Developing one or more successors also means the manager will have people to delegate more to, as well as cover as their ‘acting’ while they are on vacation or away on business.
It also provides a meaningful focus to developing your employees, which itself will improve their competencies so that they can deliver better results.
Finally, it ensures the success that the manager created continues after they leave. This is both great leadership and deeply fulfilling.
Why Succession Planning Matters
The benefits of having a succession planning and development policy are so many it really does amaze me that more organisations don’t take it more seriously. Of all the organisations I have worked with, only one, a major duty-free company, actually practiced it. Their policy was to recruit the right people, identify the potentials and where they might end up (supervisory or middle to senior management), put them on the appropriate track, and then develop their knowledge and competencies through coaching and mentoring by their line managers, as well as through training.
Another reason to consider it is that, without a prepared successor, an organisation can sometimes go into sudden freefall when a strong, competent leader leaves, especially if the wrong person is recruited. Perhaps if Manchester United had prepared a successor to Alex Ferguson after he left, they would have continued with the success he created (Liverpool managed to continue it under different managers who started as assistants to the managers in in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. Incidentally, I don’t support either club!) The same pattern has happened in some major businesses, where the organisation has gone into decline after a strong leader leaves and no internal successor has been prepared .
A friend of mine experienced this first hand when working for a construction company where the owner brought in an external executive to run it after he stepped down. The executive started to replace senior managers with people he knew, each of them being given high salaries and company cars. Contracts were lost as the new executive didn’t have the relationships, nor really the competencies for the position, and having gone into decline, it was sold for a lot less than it had been worth when the owner stepped down.
Too many companies have the ‘grass is greener’ syndrome, believing an external hire will bring in new ideas and fresh success. If your organisation or department is already successful, why should there be a need. The fact is, between 40%-70% of external senior hires fail within 18 months of joining. That’s quite a gamble.
Your own employees know your culture, your products, your services, your customers, your policies and the way you get things done. Plus, they have already invested a lot of time in your organisation, so they really do want it to succeed.
In summary, if your organisation has not yet implemented a succession planning and development policy, now could be a good time to start. The benefits, for both the organisation, managers, and for employees, are too numerous and too important to ignore.
