In your organisation who is responsible for Succession Planning? Is it owned at C-level, is it owned by individual line managers or is it owned by HR?
OK, OK, this question is a lot like asking who is responsible for Talent Management. But for me, Succession Planning is an interesting topic because its an easy way to introduce the concept of Talent Management to people that are not HR practitioners because Succession Planning is all about managing risk.
Risk Management is something that anybody in the organisation can understand. Risk Management leads to conversations about Business Continuity, resilience and inevitably to scenario planning and at that point Succession Planning becomes a 'hard' topic with none of the 'fluff' of other talent management concepts (eg Recognition, Career Planning and Skills and Leadership Development)perceived by those outside HR. In the context of risk management Succession Planning is vital in keeping the organisation running through periods of forced change.
The traditional HR view of Succession Planning is fairly straight-forward. The short-term emergency is typically about filling a vacated seat, usually of a senior executive and sometimes of key technical staff. This point is well articulated in the clip: Refilling The Pipeline.
The medium-term is about mapping the current workforce to future organisational design and understanding the development needs of a group of 'High Potentials' that may go on to succeed members of the current senior management team. The long-term looks at the capabilities needed by the organisation and the career path from entry level jobs through to C-level.
The traditional approach to Succession Planning takes a linear perspective, based on 'business as usual' conditions, geared to the higher echelons, reinforcing the organisational 'chain of command'. It is biased towards seniority and strata as a framework and on filling vacancies as an outcome rather than replacing talented individuals. Replacing talented individuals is many times more difficult than filling a vacancy and, in organisations with flatter structures, Succession Planning requires more creativity.
I've read a lot of late about employee engagement - whether it be for retention purposes or keeping the engine chugging along or both.
One of the posts that I liked (Employee Engagement Defined by Brad Federman) came from the Employee Engagement Network. The first 3 lines of that post really sums up the subject nicely:
Why Employee Engagement?
To increase the productivity and tenure of (key) employees in a manner that creates healthier organizations both on and off of the balance sheet.
The main reasons that the HR blogosphere has turned its attention to Employee Engagement are the negative impacts of a down economy on the employed: Some employee's may lose focus as they worry about their wealth, their jobs or their leadership, behaviours may change to compensate for changes in the organisation environment as they become more competitive, more aggressive or less cohesive and, of course motivation and morale can be affected by redundancies and restructuring.
With this kind of uncertainty in the workforce and headcount under control, organisations often revisit their approach to performance management so that clarity can be brought to individuals working lives and so that the organisation ensures that it is getting value from each employee in terms of productivity and contribution.
Over the past few months StepStone has been working with Bersin & Associates to develop a tool for organisations to benchmark their strategies against best practices in Talent Management.
That tool, www.talentstrategyassessment.com, makes a complex task, really simple. I'd had a go at using the tool myself and found that, after responding to 19 straight-forward questions in less than 10 minutes, I got two things:
A scorecard comparing my strategy to others from Bersin's huge pool of research, with red, amber and green status indicators that alert me to the areas I need to work on
A detailed (29 page) analysis and commentary of my responses with suggestions for improving my talent management strategy.
The scorecard and report covers the core of talent management strategy development:
Our first guest post comes from Susan Miller, StepStone's Director of Consulting Product Design. Susan shares her thoughts on the importance of preparing for the up-turn by building a quality pool of talent now and gives 10 points to action.
Your organisation may have a freeze on recruitment but that doesn’t mean that the applications stop arriving. Application levels can be even higher during a down economy and smart HR organisations use this opportunity to help identify candidates they might want to hire in the future and to keep in touch with them until the right job opens up.
No one can predict when we will come out of the current economic situation but one thing can be predicted – we will come out of it. When we do, organisations want, and need, to be ready to hire the best.
Right now some organisations are drowning in applications. Tools like StepStone’s recruitment products can help employers manage the deluge and keep in contact with candidates who have future potential. The software can take the strain but changing business practices is essential. For example, once a candidate's application arrives in an organisation's database and has been filtered and categorised properly, organisations can gain sourcing advantage by using the database as a resource to tap later. Defining key roles and critical criteria now is the first step to profile the type of talent that you want to pool for the future.
We know of organisations that have paid to post new positions on job boards with agencies or in paper media only to discover that the candidates sourced were already in their own database. What happens with former candidates that were classified as ‘nearly there’ for previous vacancies? Do you keep in touch with them? Do you actively look at what you already have before advertising?
In a time where companies must optimise the use of all existing assets, talent pooling is a must-have. To develop, maintain and nurture a quality talent pool takes time and effort but it should be an essential element of your near-term plan to ride the up-turn. So what do you need to do to get started?
Identify the area of operations most likely to need resource in the upturn
Work on the resource requirements for those areas
Design role profiles
Agree criteria and ratings for the profiles
Create talent pools based on the criteria and ratings
Search your database for candidates that match the criteria and ratings and assign matches to your talent pools
Contact candidates added to your talent pools to establish if they are interested in future roles
Identify the % of potential roles that might be filled by those in your talent pool and keep track of the costs in order to demonstrate cost savings
Keep in touch and build relationships with the candidates in your talent pool
Set goals for the number of hires that you wish to make from your talent pool and monitor progress against them
Once you’ve set up your pools, the next element of your near-term plan is to look into where you will source candidates for potential roles that have a low probability of being filled through the talent pool. With those elements taken care of, you can get back to dealing with the present and eyeing the long-term. Even during lean times, business critical roles always require high performers; so if you spot a star for the future don’t leave them unattended in your pool.
