designing and implementing succession plans

The leadership PIPELINE

It is imperative for an organisation to work towards designing and implementing succession plans for all the leaders in its units

    Aclassical challenge an organisation faces quarter after quarter is to please the stock markets,analysts,shareholders and investors,while ensuring growth for its own talent and providing adequate opportunities for its own people to make a career and grow in the organisation.It is not an either-or situation and both those objectives would need to go hand-in-hand.The debate on whether to build or buy talent continues to engage a lot of decision-makers since the need is to balance a return on investments v/s return on individuals.
    A survey from the Conference Board CEO Challenge, 2013,identifies human capital as the biggest challenge that today’s CEOs face.The CEOs in Asia cite ‘enhancing effectiveness of senior management teams’and ‘improving leadership development programmes to grow talent internally’as the most difficult challenges and this would necessarily mean that a lot of time,effort and money have to be invested to overcome these challenges.
    While there are different approaches to overcome such situations,many organisations end up scratching the surface and look at development by organising training programmes through classroom training and believe that it would suffice. However,this would need to be supplemented by a series of actions including providing for higher education programmes, online training,membership to portals and providing reading material online or through libraries.This would provide the individual a lot more information to get additional perspectives and understanding,as compared to what was imparted,trained,shared,taught or experienced in the classroom sessions.
    While it is imperative to also bring in fresh talent when there are emergent situations,it is equally important for organisations to develop people from within.This will ensure that the basic ethos of the organisation is not lost.It will ensure continuity,build loyalty and would be a great magnet for people to join,stay,contribute and grow in the organisation. Focusing on building a leadership pipeline encourages leaders to ‘be ready for the next level’and be ahead of the curve and builds solidity and confidence as the organisation grows.The basic philosophy and culture of the organisation have to support and encourage the growth of an employee from within.A solid framework has to be in place to define and reward high-potential candidates.It is therefore extremely critical that the identified talent be given special attention, coaching and training to prepare them for the next level.
    In addition to providing a series of interventions and leadership development programmes, an organisation also has to focus on designing and implementing succession plans for all leaders in their units and not treat it in isolation.Training and development interventions and a well-thought-out succession plan go hand-in-hand and cannot be considered in silos.They are interconnected processes where training becomes the input for the output of succession planning.The process of succession management needs to be flexible enough to help in developmental activities of the leaders.It should not be limited to a rigid list of high-potential employees and the slots they might fill.It should not remain as a tool to create an alternate organisational chart; it should focus on the development of its employees.For any such interventions to succeed,it is imperative that all actions need to be coordinated and cannot be done piecemeal.The need is to combine succession planning and leadership development and have coaches and mentors to support the development of individuals.One should also put in place robust performance management for individuals to know areas they would need to work upon to move up the value chain.