Succession Planning

Succession planning is the risk management component of talent management.

It is basically looking at critical roles in your business and making sure that, if the person doing any one of those roles left your business, you would continue to operate successfully.

So, how do you define a critical role?

A critical role is one that meets one or more of these criteria:

 It is business critical immediately.

If no one does this job tomorrow, customers and/or the business will be impacted. These roles often have key knowledge about your business that no one else has.

 It is strategically critical.

If no one does this job in the next few weeks, there will be a gap in planning and/or execution and the business will not meet new opportunities or critical challenges as they arise.

 It is leadership critical.

If no one does this job, large parts of your team will not have required leadership or guidance. This is often only important for jobs that require day-to-day instruction or guidance, or where you’re undergoing transformation or change that requires constant injections of inspiration or energy to retain momentum.

It is customer critical.

If you lose the current person doing this job, their relationship is so strong and important to key customers that the customer relationship will be at risk.

It is very difficult to find people with the skills to do this job.

If you lose the current employee who does this work, you know that there are very few, if any, people in the market who can do this work.

If you have roles that meet any of these criteria, it is recommended that you do succession planning behind the role. This will ensure you have (at least) emergency replacements for any critical roles should particular individuals leave the business or become unable to do their role for a sustained period of time. It can also assist in considering longer-term replacements in more planned succession decisions.