Planning, Not Scrambling, for Succession
Lynne Lazaroff, Training & Organizational Development Consultant, POD
Traditionally, succession planning was associated with grooming the chosen few to take over when leaders moved up or out. While there's still great value in organizations developing leadership pipelines and feeding them through training, coaching, mentorship programs, and the like, it's equally true that succession planning for staff at all levels doesn't require developing and administering a big fancy program. In essence, succession planning is the marriage of organizational planning and employee development.
You can implement or invigorate succession planning in your organization simply by incorporating a few best practices into your existing efforts, and the return can be significant: reducing turnover, creating more opportunities for promoting from within, maintaining institutional knowledge, and aligning the right people with the right jobs.
At its core, succession planning is about delineating the knowledge and skills each role needs in order to meet the current and anticipated business need. In other words, who or what will it take to achieve success with the programs, products, or services that comprise your work, now and in the future? It would be easy to go down sixteen different rabbit holes trying to answer that question, so I hope to put you on a more direct path.
The Task and The Process
As a leader, you're charged with two things: the actual product or service and the process. In the OD (organizational development) world, we often refer to the product or service as the task. This is the trade that you and your unit or department ply—be that providing degree programs for engineers, housing to UW students, IT services to your department, or care for trauma patients. The process, on the other hand, is the people side of things—who you have to accomplish said task, and how well they're doing it. With succession planning and other forms of business planning, you need both the task and the process much like you need both lenses in your glasses; it's the two together that form good vision.
On the task side, a major institutional or environmental change—such as organizational restructuring, new legislation, a significant advance in your field, or a massive donor gift—may shift strategic priorities or direction. In turn, you'll be challenged to reassess who or what it will now take to be successful, examine your current workforce, and identify any gaps that might keep you from meeting emerging needs.
As an example on the process side, I worked with a government agency that was concerned with imminent brain drain due to the number of boomers they expected to retire within five years. In a nutshell, they needed to ensure continuity of process in order to counter the loss of institutional knowledge. A large part of their solution involved identifying less seasoned employees in the agency with potential and interest in being the new torchbearers and then forming a plan to develop their expertise.
Of course, in times of crisis or change, priorities have a way of demanding attention, and you might find yourself scrambling for successors and pulling out the monocle to focus on either the task or the process. Ideally, though, the hope is to anticipate and plan for change rather than to be shocked by it. To that end, environmental scanning is a powerful tool.
Environmental Scanning
Answering the core succession planning question—who or what will it take to achieve success now and in the future?—could be a Sisyphean effort. By the time you reach the top of the hill, the entire institutional landscape could have changed. To keep the ball moving forward as much as possible, I recommend that leaders perform regular environmental scans.
Strategic planning can also shed light on the task or process, but most of us tend to do that kind of planning irregularly or only every so many years. Environmental scanning, on the other hand, is something you can do fairly rapidly on, say, a monthly or quarterly basis (how often depends on the rate of change on your team, within your organization, and in your field or area of business).
Environmental scanning involves answering three questions: What's happening inside and outside your organization…
- Right now?
- In the near future?
- In the distant future?
These questions may be answered by you alone, during a brainstorming session at a team meeting, as part of a management retreat, through surveying or talking with stakeholders, or by a combination of these methods. The key is to keep your approach manageable enough that your environmental scans are consistent; once the process becomes too bloated or complex, it's increasingly likely you won't complete scans as regularly as you should.
When responding to these questions, keep those task/process glasses handy and make sure the lenses have bifocal or even multi-focal properties, allowing you to see close to home (internal factors) and far into the outside world (external factors). Here's an example of what your scan might look like:
- Right now, you might be dealing with an unprecedented number of students who have declared a major in your program. Your first concern may be the task and whether you're offering enough classes to accommodate this increase. From there you may turn to the process side and whether you have enough faculty to offer more classes as well as enough advisory and administrative staff to support more students, classes, and/or faculty. Where are there gaps, and how are you going to fill them?
- On your radar for the near future may be modernization efforts at the UW, such as those under way with HR/P and undergraduate admissions. How will people's work change and what competencies will be needed for success once new systems are in place? What training might staff need to be more adept with new technology?
- For the distant future, you may be mulling over everything from your own retirement to federal funding sources and trends in your field. Your future thinking may even include loftier big-picture ideas such as your unit's or department's mission and vision.
The correlation to succession planning may not always be direct or clear, and that's okay. As the old adage goes, the more you plan, the more you can ignore the plan. Even if some of your answers to the above questions are no more than wild guesses, the mere act of going through an environmental scan may turn up obstacles, opportunities, and insights that wouldn't otherwise have come to mind.
Developing Talent
As a manager, just when you think you've got the right people in place, something changes. What I'd suggest is treating your team members not just as current employees but as potential successors—be that for promotion to leadership positions, lateral moves to different types of work, or advances in responsibility. It's a long-term venture, but the payoff is clear: cultivating competitive in-house talent from which to draw.
With succession planning and talent development in general, people often start with senior management and then work down to mid-level managers, front-line supervisors, and, finally, individual contributors. Depending on your position within the organization, this might be a fine approach, but you should also consider that your entire workforce is a pool of talent that you can develop. The 9-box performance-potential matrix is a popular tool for succession planning and can help clarify which employees could benefit from development and who may be ready for the next step.
As daunting as it may seem to create your own in-house talent pool, a key component is simply having more frequent and strategic conversations with your staff members about their professional development. Whether during a routine one-on-one or a performance review, your opening pitch could sound something like, "I don't have any plans to leave right now, and I think our team is pretty solid, but I'm always planning for the future. Since I value you as a team member, I want to make sure you're a viable candidate for positions that may open up on our team."
You could then point to areas where an employee has shown aptitude, inquire about related goals, and talk about what competencies could be developed for organizational alignment. Keep in mind that employees may be inclined to either set goals to help them be more successful in their current positions and or to ascend a specific career ladder. In either case, you can help expand their perspective and encourage aspirations by talking about current unmet needs or anticipated future needs on your team or within the larger organization.
Here's where the aforementioned marriage of organizational planning and employee development really flourishes: Once you combine the information collected from your latest environmental scan with the insights gathered from your conversations with staff, connections, opportunities, and even "eureka" moments will begin to materialize. The more you keep at it, the better you'll be able to divine where your employees' interests and potential and the anticipated needs of your unit or department intersect.
I should point out that this kind of talent development creates numerous win-wins across the organization. When you begin developing existing employees to meet current and anticipated needs, you also increase opportunities for promoting from within, show your staff you value them and their potential, provide your employees with support for gaining new skills and experience, and put a big stake in the ground for retention. Meanwhile, of course, you're also making your team more resilient and putting your organization in a better position to handle ever-shifting realities and priorities.
What If
Managers deal with a lot of "what ifs." What if three staff members go in on a lottery ticket together and win? What if a handful of your employees retire at the same time? What if retention plummets due to millennials' tendency to change jobs more frequently? What if the core competencies needed for success radically change?
One HR administrator I spoke with recently here at the UW was grappling with wanting to promote more from within. Time and again when vacancies had opened, their staff didn't have the right skills and experience, so they ended up hiring the wildcard—an unknown person from outside the organization. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but this administrator wished to be able to promote more people with institutional knowledge who already understood and valued the organizational culture.
These and other scenarios would benefit from a good dose of succession planning. While no one can foresee everything that might be coming around the bend, performing regular environmental scans, keeping tabs on your employees' interests and goals, and developing a more robust internal talent pool will put you and the larger organization in a more favorable position. Of course, not every single one of your employees will move up or over to a new position on your team, but as experiences are broadened, skills are acquired, and resumes are enhanced, I think you'll find your employees engaged and thriving.
