One of the outcomes of creating and implementing a successful organization design is to put an organization structure in place that will help your organization deliver on its goals. But if you do that without also implementing a defined succession planning process, the effectiveness of your design could be in jeopardy.

What Is Succession Planning?

Succession planning or bench planning refers to the practice of building talent management systems and processes to ensure there are leaders always identified and ready when important positions are vacant.

Without it, what happens when a leader leaves the organization? Teams could end up in limbo for months waiting for a new leader to be put in place. If you have not proactively identified and started to prepare a leadership bench in the organization, you could find that your leadership pipeline has run dry when you most need it.

Succession planning helps to ensure the future stability and growth of leadership continuity in your organization.

The Five Steps

An effective succession planning process includes:

1. Identifying and defining key roles

2. Assessing or reassessing the critical competencies required for success in each role

3. Identifying employees who have the potential to fill each role and their level of readiness (for example: ready now; ready in 1–2 years, and so on)

4. Creating development plans to accelerate readiness

5. Nurturing an external pipeline of capable leaders who could be “ready now” if there is no one internal ready to step into the role

Learning Is Often Overlooked

Many organizations that create bench charts fall short of true succession planning because they forget about learning. One of the main goals of identifying a bench is to minimize disruption and ensure a smooth transition when a critical role is open. That requires a candidate who is ready to quickly step into the role.

Once you identify employees for the bench chart, learning becomes the focus. With the capabilities required of the new role in mind, for each employee:

• Assess their current skill set, highlighting transferable skills as well as skill gaps.

• Create a tailored development plan focused on scaling transferable skills and closing any skill or experience gaps.

• Define specific long-term and short-term learning goals with specific learning milestones.

• Provide training and development opportunities including formal classroom learning, stretch assignments, special projects, leadership development programs, mentoring partnerships, and ongoing coaching from the direct leader and potentially from an external coach.

• Provide opportunities for exposure to more senior leadership, speaking opportunities in regular team meetings or organization town halls, or external conferences.

• Monitor and evaluate their progress with regular reviews, ongoing feedback, and reassessment of skills and skill gaps.

Disciplined Planning

Succession planning is not a one-time activity. It requires a disciplined and structured process to ensure it continues to evolve as organizational goals grow and change. Key practices that will ensure that leaders effectively monitor, sustain, and evolve the succession plan include:

Regular review: Establish a cadence, quarterly or bi-annually to review the plan at fixed intervals. Movement on the bench chart–either because someone moves into a new role or leaves the organization–triggers a review as well.

Assign a plan owner: Designate a specific plan owner who will ensure that reviews are set up, the right people are brought into the discussion, and that the plan is up to date and being acted on appropriately.

More frequent learning check-ins: Set a more frequent cadence to ensure that learning plans are being created and executed.

Use of analytics: Collect and analyze data on employee performance, employee engagement, employee performance, and turn over to help inform your succession planning process. Identify trends to spot areas of opportunity or potential issues.

Alignment checks: When organizational strategies and goals change, review your plan to ensure that your succession strategy is in alignment to help deliver on those goals.

Engage leaders: Regularly engage and update senior leaders on successful placements, challenging roles that will require recruiting externally, opportunities to provide mentorship or sponsorship, and the need for feedback and input as the plan evolves.

The more you develop your succession planning acumen and discipline, the more that you will be able to ensure that you have a robust pipeline of ready-now talent at every level in the organization.