You’ve put your blood, sweat and tears into creating your company, and you don’t want anything to happen to it in the event you’re no longer around to oversee the day-to-day operations. That’s why it’s essential to take the proper steps to protect it. This is called succession planning. It’s the process of identifying critical positions in the organization and creating a talent pipeline by preparing employees to fill vacancies in their organization as others retire or move on. Typically, a successor is an employee with the skills, abilities, and knowledge to fill a vacant position.
By going through succession planning, you ensure business continuity and performance, especially during times of shifting leadership. If you can’t identify a successor within your organization, succession planning helps identify the skills, knowledge, and training needed to find an external candidate.
There are plenty of risks of not focusing on succession planning, and it can leave your organization vulnerable.
Some of the risks include:
- Lost time trying to find, hire, and get a new successor up to speed.
- Loss of critical knowledge that may never be recovered.
- Naming a successor who lacks commitment, skills, knowledge, and training to do the job successfully.
- Disruptions to organizational processes, protocols, and workflows.
The best way to begin succession planning is by using analytics. Your organization has the data and a story to tell. Leverage this data to identify people who are eligible to retire or for people who another organization may poach. Using the data to provide a visual representation of the workforce is a strong strategy for succession planning.
You need to ask yourself if your organization was to lose its most critical employees today, would you have a successor with the knowledge, skills, and training required to fill their shoes?
If you need help or advice on looking through the numbers or with a strategy to begin succession planning, please give us a call. We’d be happy to help.