Make Your Organization the Best It Can Be
How can an organization make their corporate vision a vibrant reality? There’s a long list of possible answers, but one of the simplest, most important, and often overlooked is this: create a succession plan like the life of the organization depends on it, because it does.
Succession planning translates to having a talent map of your organization, knowing who has the potential to fit where, and what further development it will take to fill critical positions. Or whether outside talent needs to be recruited.
So where does your HR team begin the process of succession planning?
Assessment
The work begins with the assessment of your employee’s suitability to fill more senior positions in your organization. It can be both qualitative and quantitative and take forms like internal interviews of peers or performance reports. Skills, flight risk, and leadership potential may all be factors in tagging employees as future leaders.
One effective way for an organization to map and visualize its talent is through organization charting software. Orgchart Now is one such strong example of a tool that shows the results of your company’s talent assessment metrics. Through a bundle of talent metrics, the organization can know its “bench strength”, a way to rate the readiness of a particular employee to step up into a more senior position. For example, representing this in an org chart in concert with other key metrics related to successions, such as age, experience, and headcount can give management and HR professionals a clearer picture to be able to make decisions in response to organizational change.
Development
Once an assessment of employee readiness has taken place, a process can begin to either hire external talent to meet the potential succession needs of the company or develop the existing workforce. Existing gaps in the organization become clear when key metrics are applied across the company hierarchy. Where a lack of skills or expertise buttressing more senior management is apparent, steps can be taken to better prepare those budding employees. Management training is one strategy a company can take to elevate an employee’s readiness; mentoring is another.
Succession planning is one of the most vital contributions current management can make to the future health of your organization. It focuses your team on central objectives and how to bring the company into alignment with them. Gain the knowledge to make your corporate vision a reality tomorrow through assessment and development of a succession plan today.
