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.   

In his post 5 Steps to getting Started in Talent Scenario Planning, Kevin Wheeler argues that "Succession planning should be undertaken as a fairly short-term process for evaluating current needs rather than the longer term annual process" because "when companies are looking out more than a few months, scenario planning offers a more useful alternative."      

Succession Planning as a part of an organisations approach to managing risk adds extra dimensions which lead to scenario based succession.  Scenario based succession plans may differ remarkably from the 'business as usual' plan.  For example

• Organisations may operate an alternative command structure
• Succession may be based on individual skills appropriate to the scenario 
• Succession may be temporary

Organisations taking part in scenario planning activity may find that they need to develop multiple succession plans to deal with each scenario.  For example would the succession plan developed in the context of business as usual be different to a plan developed to deal with the impacts of senior managers being kidnapped, or new technologies disrupting the market, or the workforce being affected by Swine Flu or would the response be the same in each scenario?

In uncertain times shouldn't organisations be drafting multiple Succession Plans to ensure business continuity?   

Tags: cold war for talent, development, emergency, internal mobility, plan, planning, resilience, risk, risk management, skills, succession, succession plan

This entry was posted on Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 2:33 pm and is filed under Talent Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.