Awful Policy 1: Only Allowing Planners to Select Successors from the chain of command under a position

Successors should be the best candidates for the role regardless of the current department or position they hold in a company.

Awful Policy 2: Heralding super-flat organizations as a nirvana of efficiency.

Communication, goal setting, career paths and many other issues are often crippled by the huge gap between levels in a flat organization.

Awful Policy 3: Allowing performance review scores to be weighted as high as 80% of criteria for placement as successor

Unless your performance management rates and process are perfect AND geared specifically for succession planning, you are setting yourself up for complete failure.

Awful Policy 4: Only doing succession planning for the top three layers of an organization.

There are key positions throughout organizations that need succession plans or replacement plans far more than many in the upper ranks of the organization.

Awful Policy 5: Producing future workforce strategies without reviewing the data of historic workforce trends and external market conditions.

History will repeat itself. It’s a famous adage and it applies to the lessons you need to learn in your own employee base as well. What can history prepare you for now?

Awful Policy 6: Avoiding line managers and business unit leaders when it comes to making employee policies, because they “don’t understand HR”

Help them understand their workforce and make sure you distribute the input gathering to include the management in the fields from succession planning, to compensation decisions, to team structures and many other topics. If they don’t understand the impact of their decisions on the big picture of the workforce, then shame on you, not them. It is your job to engage them with tools and conversations.

Awful Policy 7: Accepting that hard to use software is better because it is more complex and will do more for you. Or, cheaper software is merely simpler or give you a faster, yet lesser return.

You need to select software that fits your organization’s needs and the way your people think and process their requirements.

Oh boy, I could keep going but then this wouldn’t be a blog post, it would be a manifesto or something too scary to read.  If you are harboring out dated, closed minded or dusty traditions shake them off and kick them out of your company.  You know there are some ugly ones out there.  I didn’t even go to the illegal, discriminatory or evil things, that should be a given.  Improve your kingdom (or queendom if we have to be politically correct and in the spirit of the new Commonwealth perspective.

Think about it – if we are thinking ahead in terms of talent development and management, then we’ll be prepared for change with resources at the ready (to a degree, of course). Take the 9 box, for example. If your company consistently rates and reviews top talent, you benefit in a couple of ways. First, you can easily see where you have gaps that you need to fill. That knowledge alerts you to start looking for talent to add to your bench. Second, you can see who needs talent development in order to be ready for that next opportunity. If someone’s a low-performer, could training or coaching help? If you’ve got a high-performer in their current specialty, is it time to move them into a different position to give them a broader view of the organization and groom them to be a successor?

Speaking of successors…your succession and replacement planning duties are critical to the ABP credo. By investing the time and energy to identify and develop a strong bench of talented candidates for key positions, you (and a prepared candidate) are ready to fill that critical position as soon as it opens up. Be sure to make those plans at least two or even better, three, candidates deep to keep your plan in place even if your top succession candidate unexpectedly becomes unavailable.

Strategically speaking, it’s also important for HR to know where the organization is headed so that they can support those future goals with the necessary talent. When we are a part of conversations regarding new product lines, headquarters relocation, outsourcing, etc, we have the chance to keep both individuals and the larger workforce population ready. You’ll know that a new Product Marketing Manager will be necessary to head up that new line in the not too distant future. And you can share with the relocation committee important workforce considerations – such as nearby colleges that could feed the labor pool. I hope to see more organizations recognizing the value of HR input ahead of the game and including us in more of those meetings.

Meanwhile, remember this mantra: Always. Be. Planning.

Cheers,

Lois

Most interviewing cycles have several phases.  A typical one would have you go through a screening interview with someone in HR, followed by a more in depth interview with the hiring manager, and then possibly talking to his or her boss, followed by conversations with other specialists in the company.  The interviewer in each scenario will have a series of questions that you will, of course, need to be prepared for, but I find that the best candidates distinguish themselves when they prepare questions to ask me.  It is particularly effective if they can introduce some idea of a process or methodology that could help me or my company.   As a tip, next time you’re at this point in an interview try asking “What qualities do you or your company look for when evaluating high potential employees?”

The chances are that the hiring manager will struggle a little to answer that question, and that’s your opening.  If there is a board somewhere, ask permission and go draw a nine-box on it demonstrating how you use the tool to evaluate yourself.  The manager may have heard of a nine-box, but it is likely he or she never used it with any regularity.  This gives you the chance to visually paint a flattering picture of yourself while introducing a useful scoring tool to the manager to run his organization.  I can almost guarantee that he or she will remember you after the interview.

The reason the nine-box is effective is that strong leaders tend to be more visual than oral, so any chance you get to leave an imprint on their mind will likely leave you with a leg up on the competition.   Good hunting!

But, why should we stop there?  Aquire is implementing some great creative usage in the 9 box to help solve many business and talent-driven decisions.  I bet you would love to see performance rating on one axis and the scale of salary or raise % within a 9 box.  It allows people to fall directly into the 9 box and you can see the outliers during your bonus planning.  It is very powerful.

Another use of the traditional potential by performance 9 box view is during bonus assignments and raise awards. This has increased management’s satisfaction with the compensation process.  The managers feel better about the fairness and the distribution of funds, when they can visualize the value distribution of their key players.

A workforce analyst is diagnosing risk for retirement pain points by reviewing age by tenure on the matrix.  When you need to see comparative details to a group of people, the visualization of the distribution is very powerful and makes the data very easy to understand.

The 9-box is powerful and its power is magnified when you can compare, side by side, the individuals in any area of the 9 box or select individuals.  Multiply the power again when you can transfer the visualization of the 9 box content in a color coded map in the org chart.  NOW, you have the power to see the applicable information in the context of the hierarchy structure of the organization and the information has real meaning.

Your planning is stronger.  Your decision making is more confident.  Your processes have a reduction in risk, when you can really see the information you need in an impactful view.  So to really deliver value to your management, I ask…What’s in your 9-box?

Cheers,

Lois

Mike Molinaro, VP of HR Operations at Comcast, and Tom McKeown, our president and COO, will be at ASUG Fall Focus, presenting Comcast’s succession planning case study. If you will be at the conference, be sure to support us and learn how Aquire has developed a state-of-the-art succession planning system for Comcast’s 100,000 employees! Tom and Mike will be presenting on Thursday, October 7 from 9:15-10:15 a.m. In the meantime, check out the presentation deck above! If you’re not already registered, register here.

But besides all the rabbit holes we could go down for that specific topic, let’s talk about the needs for succession planning.  Do you think that 6 months ago BP thought they would be discussing the replacement of their CEO this summer?  Do you think that there is only one person being replaced at BP? – NOT  What about the people that specifically managed the work around regulations to avoid building a relief well?  I would bet these less visible positions will be turning over quickly too.

Any given high level position change is likely to target 2 – 6 more moves or hires within the organization.  Each person that get moved up, leaves a position that needs to be filled.  New people in new positions, whether hired from the outside or promoted from a succession plan is going to consider their new team and evaluate if they want to make changes.  This creates another cascade affect.  Companies need to be prepared for this dynamic. Staffing changes ALL THE TIME!  Critical roles cannot be left unfilled for very long, regardless of the reason they were made empty.  What are you doing to either…

1)help prepare your organization deal with the trickle effect of replacing people throughout your company

or

2)make sure you are qualified and willing to step up to new responsibilities in the organization when opportunities arrive.

Look at the steps for succession planning (these are very high level, there is much more to the process, but these  will get you started.

Know that when a decision goes wrong, there may be ramifications up and down the chain of command.  Succession Planning is not just for the c-suite.  Are you watching the trends of your organization to see where the highest turnover is taking place?  Could you change those turnover trends by doing a better job of succession planning?  Are your people being developed so that when they are needed to fill another position? Are they are trained and familiar with the teams and processes in the department?  Are you measuring which leaders are preparing your future executives by promoting them and providing career and project mobility?

These are critical questions to be asking of your organization and putting systems in place to make all of this information visible and the plans executable.  What are you doing to make sure you are contributing to the stability and growth of the organization?  You think that might be a hot seat today.  It is a much cooler seat then it will be when there is a crises for replacements raises its head, so step up.

Cheers,

Lois

Succession planning discussions aren’t limited to HR industry magazines and websites anymore – just Google search “Yankees succession plan” and you’ll get a host of hits from a wide range of sources. Clearly this is more than just buzz – it’s top of mind in the business community, as I believe it should be. A sound succession plan keeps organizations on the path to success.

So why do we hesitate to create that crucial blueprint? Confusion? Dread? Lack of resources and tools? Too many of us get bogged down in the concept of managing the process instead of focusing on the plan itself.

This is a subject that I’ve been tackling head on lately. So, I thought I’d put all of our recent succession planning resources here. I hope you enjoy!

The Fort Worth Business Press recently published my article Succession Planning Needed to Safeguard Future that addresses solutions to the roadblocks many organizations throw in the way of succession planning.

I also blogged about it – Five Succession Planning Steps: Don’t make it harder than it is!, It must have struck a chord, because that entry was picked up and reposted on the Entrepreneurs’ Organization website – a group of more than 7,300 business owners in 42 countries dedicated to sharing business and leadership knowledge.

So now Aquire has developed another resource to help break down the process into manageable steps: Safeguard the Future with Succession Planning – a short presentation that breaks down the process into five easy steps. It’s free to watch on demand with no registration required. What’s holding you back from succession planning? I’d love to know!

Cheers,

Lois

Fill Open Position

A lot of companies struggle with identifying critical positions. They choose to flag these critical roles so succession plans can be created to fill the slots should they become vacant positions. Sometimes, it is a political issue within a company as to which positions are critical. An individual of great value or of sensitive ego may feel threatened if their position is not defined as critical. 

There are a lot of definitions for critical roles. One site that includes a few blog entries, and LOTS of great leadership information is Dan McCarthy. I don’t agree with all of his thoughts, and I believe that most companies go deeper to seek their critical roles than his post suggests.  But I still like his explanation and several links from this blog post. The Leadership Examiner has another refined article, by Steve Arneson, to help you define critical roles.

Now, Star Trek was a show that could give us lessons in identifying critical roles. When a crew was beamed down to a new planet, you knew who the critical players were – they were the ones with names. The one guy on the landing crew who, typically, didn’t have a real name (you could call him “Lieutenant I’m a Gonner”) always died on the mission. He was not critical.

For a better indicator in today’s corporations about which roles are critical, you could start with a really quick conversation.  Begin by asking, when the position came open during the toughest economy we have experienced in many of our lifetimes, was the company required to fill the position in order to service the customer or the corporation properly? Then look at positions that did open up during the last 2 years. If the position HAD opened up, would you be compelled to fill the position, even if you had to fight for the budget money?

This may be an over simplification of the definition for many companies. But sometimes the simple approach can be really helpful.  I hope it is this time for somebody.

Cheers,
Lois

Star Trek is a trademark of Paramount Pictures, CBS, and their licensees.

I’ll let you read it and then I’ll ask a question…”Are you a CEO  afraid to build out your succession plan because it’s planning your own funeral?” I have at least two pieces of advice for you.

First, you need to find some good Mid-West American sensibility and get over it. You know it’s going to happen sometime. Of course you plan your own funeral – if you want it to go your way!

Second, most public company CEOs are compensated with a large amount of shares in your company. If you want those shares to be worth more after you leave, then you need to develop a really strong team that can rise to the occasion and excel after you’re gone.

Any CEO who thinks the company will tank after they leave is not only an egotistical fool, but also a poor leader because it proves that they didn’t develop their team. Hmmm…

The same goes for every manager who is afraid to create your departmental succession plan. Come on…what are you afraid of? Get a succession plan – I dare you!

“Please make data easy to access, understand, and drill-down into.” That can be a tall order. Kathleen Lau from Computer World presented the case that more employees will need access to information and will be savvy about their use of the data in the article, IT pros must get smart about analytics.  Not only will employees ask for data, they’ll want to drill-down into the specifics and drill-out to see the big picture. They’ll want to see trends, as well as track specific types of data. None of them will want to learn SQL in order to fetch data from every angle they need it. They deserve tools that do the processing for them, so they can quickly get to the meaning of the data.

When I look at Aquire’s customers and consider all the different ways they’re served workforce data, the list is very extensive, and yet the specifics are critical. A manager can look at the big picture while still making life changing decisions for the individuals within the business. As a manager or a team does their talent review for promotions or future planning, like succession or replacement positioning, they need the most extensive employee profiles possible.  Nothing can be buried or excluded, or the decision will be flawed.

When workforce planning involves historical trends in order to consider possible futures for the workforce, the workforce data must have integrity and needs to be easily organized. Too many reporting tools are designed to be thrown onto any data system and provide reports with rows, columns, and a few pie charts slapped in there for good measure. Yet, it’s critical that spot solutions are provided to give the workforce data the respect it needs. Can you really consider using the same reporting tool developed for financial reporting to provide you with the measurement of your Talent Management initiative?

Yes, you can measure the success of your talent management programs, if you have the right tools to measure your talent pipeline. A very specific need within Talent Management is the ability to see how many people are being developed within a  business and getting promotions or developmental lateral moves. If IT only provides a tool already on their shelf to extract workforce data from an applicant tracking system or the HRIS system, you’re likely to suffer through a lot of manual effort entering workforce data into spreadsheets and then charting or graphing the results.  I recommend you look for specific tools that can address the workforce data challenge. Then you will feel much better about the decisions you make, as you’ll know you had the right facts and you understood the relevance of data.
Cheers,
Lois

Any business that does not have succession plans for the replacement of key employees is ignoring a serious element of their risk mitigation planning. A gap in the leadership presents so many risks. Least of them is the possibility that key strategies will go astray when there’s no leadership plan to assure business continuity.

We often find the scary part preventing businesses from performing proper talent reviews and building the model for succession plans is they’re afraid that the process of building the successor map also requires them to dive into dozens of other processes they don’t know how to do. Now, with easy tools like Aquire’s OrgPublisher Succession, you can dispel those fears. OrgPublisher Succession is direct and user friendly, providing side-by-side comparisons of potential successors, as well as powerful searching and filters that can align people into the 9 box comparison most commonly used for potential and performance analysis. You CAN get managers to participate in the succession planning of key employees if you help them keep it simple.

The Talent Strategy Group and its book One Page Talent Management also help businesses realize they can create succession plans and simplify the process. Businesses must build their replacement plan strategy and map their talent. When successors are built and chosen from within, employees realize there is a career path possibility for them. When shareholders understand that the business is planning for the movement of talent and has built the path for successors, they are more confident in investing in the organization. Without these plans in place your business is at risk of faltering in so many places.

My Mom used to tell us, “you can’t start any younger, so start today.” She was a wise woman.

Cheers,
Lois

Workforce planning is a very comprehensive term. Sometimes it gets tangled in definitions regarding only the scheduling of employees. Other times it’s used to define the budget needed for future staff. It is so much more than that.

Structure 2010 is our conference for Aquire users and the Aquire Ecosystem of consultants and influencers. It’s designed to talk about the many elements that should be considered during workforce planning. We’ll make the process of connecting all those tasks noted at the beginning of this post into one coherent structure simple, direct, and straight forward.

The keynote by Marc Effron, the expert on One Page Talent Management, will provide the power of simplicity when talent management is done right. The keynoter, Al Adamsen, will bring clarity to workforce analytics and take some of the mystery out of the concerns HR people have about the numbers. Other presentations will explain how succession planning is needed deep and wide within the organization prior to workforce changes like reorgs, mergers, and strategy planning.

There is magic in repeatable processes like established talent reviews using 9 box tools and power searches that have the memory to explore previous reviews and performance data. You will learn about visualization of the structure of your organization and the people who are in the right place. You will learn the pitfalls of having  an organizational structure that is too flat or one that is too tall or too deep.

Then, there is the focus on workforce planning leader-by-leader. It’s critical to empower your leaders to build the strategic workforce plan. It’s important that information is not held in an analyst’s ivory tower, but is accessible and understandable throughout the management team. Only then will you get the real impact of your workforce trends and workforce knowledge. When you distribute the effort of building your succession plans, you’re really sowing the leadership development of your managers and learning from their knowledge of their people. Structure 2010 will show you how to do these things and open up discussions so you can learn from your peers.

Join us April 25 – 27th and a free day of training on the 28th in Fort Worth, Texas. It is all connected and you will feel connected, too.

Cheers,
Lois

Performance management is often a challenge for the manager. It’s important to recap  the annual feedback during these discussions. Hopefully, your reviews are more about the future than about the past. I tried for years to  call them goal setting sessions and projections instead of reviews. I have not succeeded in the renaming, but we have succeeded in the content of the conversation. Our processes are geared towards looking at the future; setting the goals and, now, about succession planning and career development in more earnest and in common, corporate-wide terminology.

How did we get a real succession planning discussion going? We asked everybody the question.

In our annual employee meeting, I presented an outline of the revenue growth and proposed product growth of the company through 2015.  This led to breakout discussions allowing individuals to talk about where they wanted to be in 2015, and what the company would have to look like to get there. Oh, my gosh, for all of you saying “that would never work here,” try it – or find another place to work.

Because it was awe-inspiring. Honest, and sometimes a stretch of the imagination, conversations occurred across all levels. People were helping others in different departments paint a picture of the future of the company and possibilities for growth.

They were on FIRE.

The follow-up exercise now is for each manager to discuss these aspirations and their subsequent development plans during the goal setting  process this month. Because each employee was involved in the discussion, they know the managers and co-workers were asked to draw a greater picture. It changes some of the succession planning discussion to a personally-chosen career development program. The management teams are now looking at new types of “next step” development activities. We’re aggregating training ideas across disciplines, and building opportunities for mentoring and coaching, along with formal training to help people get much further than the traditional “what training must we have to get the jobs done this year” exercise.

It’s another tool in great workforce planning to know where people want to go – not just where managers want to put them. Let’s just call it Engagement Royale!

Cheers,
Lois

So, for this round of hiring, we’re now using the 9-Box matrix, from our own Succession Planning software, to plot candidates. The traditional axes of the 9-Box are Performance and Potential. That, at least in Succession Planning best practices, is the way to find the candidates most suited for moving up the corporate ladder.

Using the 9 Box for hiring takes a little different approach, but our software can still handle the requirements. In this hiring situation, I can plot potential for leadership on one axis and cultural fit on the other, then rank the candidates in their various groupings. A technical manager is also using the 9 Box for their hiring, plotting skills matches on one axis and cultural fit on another. The potential is limitless, and brings the focus of the hiring manager onto the top two most important factors they consider for hiring.

The screening recruiter can first plot the candidates prior to the manager’s interviews, and then the manager can reorganize and re-rank people after the interviews. There are many, many choices involved in the hiring process. We have found this to be one great way to get a laser-focus and common communication schema in front of all decision makers during the hiring process.

Our customers are the buyers of HR technology and business workforce analytics software. They’re hyper-aware of their vendors because they, themselves, are in the people business. We provide great customer service, and our customers deserve it. Only the best candidates can make the cut. So, I’m glad we can use our very own Succession Planning software in a new way. It definitely increases our ROI.

Cheers,
Lois

I have never liked the term “climbing the corporate ladder.” It implies that your career path is going to be linear. I have seldom seen paths to career nirvana as straight lines. Instead, there is an analogy, pulled together by Lindsey Pollak, that aggregates several examples of why building your career as a pyramid is valuable.

This is a great analogy. Now, employers need to recognize that, in order to develop their talent and keep employees interested, they need to provide many lateral moves in their structural design. If employers don’t do this, they are forcing the employees to build the wide base of their career in multiple companies. This is counterproductive for employers.

As organizations go through their reorganizations, downsizing or merger exercises, they need to consider their succession planning and their  replacement planning as they relate to career development and retention. Will their new organizational design allow them to add to the pyramid of their employees’ careers? Can they use the analogy to help someone understand the value of a lateral move in building the foundation for future promotions?

If companies would consider the employee development value as important as they do their organizational planning, they would see better employee engagement, further career building, and thus better retention. Great organizational design and planning of the org chart lead to great monuments for personal and corporate history – the well planned career pyramid.

Cheers,
Lois

The information provided in this recent article, Plan For CIO Succession, in this week’s issue of Processor® , is very valid for many positions.

As is so often demonstrated, the talents of the executives must be a blend of many competencies. Identify the skills you want to see in your organization’s leadership and then track them for each possible candidate, better yet, for all employees. Ideally, executives must be able to balance their strengths at:

• leadership
• coaching/teamwork
• functional experience
• cross-functional awareness
• innovation
• strategy
• global understanding
• customer focus

A great technician does not necessarily make a great CIO. As the article points out, there is often more strategy involved in the job than technical work. However, in my experience, in order to build strategy about technology, practical experience with technology is also needed. A CIO with little or no “in the trenches” technology experience will find it much harder to do their job and nearly impossible to gain a following as a leader of technology resources.

So how do you get a CIO (or a head of sales, or marketing, or finance)? The simple answer: You must mentor and develop them.

The concept is the same for all positions, the execution of the development may vary. After you identify possible executive candidates, they need to be involved in strategic discussions and decisions, as well as budgeting and relations with other business units as a portion of their jobs. To develop a cohesive succession plan, you must analyze and groom many people then test their abilities to assist in many capacities of the business at hand. This is how you will know who is ready to succeed a leader.

Cheers,
Lois

One of the greatest gifts my late mother gave me is the ability to appreciate many things and to be open to inspiration from many sources. When I have to tackle a tough or especially detailed job, I try to find something that inspires me to the proper mindset. If I can find inspiration in a natural view like the sea, sky, leaves, a content cat, it helps ground me. I can then deal with the tough stuff, like a workforce planning proposal for a client, a response to a tricky succession planning issue, a presentation for an analyst to show how solid the business is and how uniquely we approach our dedication to our clients.

Another place I find inspiration and grounding is music. I have one great musical talent – I play a mean iPod®! Yes, music certainly can tame the beast, lift the mood, add a bounce to the step, and focus the mind. From classical to hip-hop, heavy metal to pop, music calls to each of us.

Truly engaging employees takes more than career development and employee recognition programs. These, as well as domain education and succession planning, are key ingredients in motivating and developing employees – within the standard corporate practice. They must exist in all organizations, but you should also infuse your corporate culture (and check this article on Zappos for a unique corporate culture) with individuality, personal as well as professional creativity – and just that right touch of quirkiness.

Obviously, blinking lights and a loud radio aren’t what you want in the way of personalizing a workspace. Don’t be afraid to give employees the freedom to view family photos added to the desktop wallpaper, read cartoons pinned to their bulletin board, or listen to music on their iPod® at work – LET THEM. It may be their best moment of inspired focus.

Cheers,
Lois

I frequently tune in to the Friday HR Happy Hour on Blog TalkRadio, a twice monthly radio talk show hosted by Steve Boese and Shauna Moerke, two great bloggers, HR professionals, and superstars in the  HR Twitter world. Between Steve, Shauna, and their call-in guests the conversation moves among many topics. During Episode 5 – Why HR?, one theme struck right to the core of the succession planning and workforce planning I do. It concerned where HR executives come from inside an organization.

Many professionals on the call came from different education and  work experience backgrounds. Callers were in heavy agreement that a large number of successful HR executives came from other areas of the company, and moved into HR to provide a strong business background as well as effect change within the workforce dynamics of the organization.

This reflects a number of impactful topics now facing the HR world. It illustrates the logic in succession planning that you must tap people from multiple disciplines as successors, not just people within the line-of-site of the key position being planned for. The concept that succession planners shouldn’t be allowed to tag somebody from outside their span-of-control is detrimental to the success of the organization. Departments need new perspectives. They need people’s input from outside their regular gravitational pull.

Get rid of the internal politics and allow for the exploration of candidates as successors to come from anywhere within your organization.

Cheers,
Lois

While watching seagulls during a little R & R at the beach, I was inspired to evaluate a number of strategies in my world, at least the execution of those strategies. What really impressed me is the full out dive gulls make directly toward their desired goal. They can be 25 feet up in the air and head straight down for that plunge into the water – and they seldom miss the fish.

The seagull doesn’t make this nose dive into the dirt. It takes the time to locate a feasible target and totally focuses on that singular quest.

Organizations face distractions eveywhere – the economic crisis, the need to restructure your hierarchy and review your talent management, rising costs for employee benefits, to name just a few. When was the last time you reevaluated your strategies to reach the targets worth that heady plunge?

• Have you revisted your workforce strategy with your management team?
• Are further cost cuts called for?
• Should you take another look at your workforce planning or succession planning?
• Do you still have a good understanding of your audience and what they want?
• Do you have the right tools in place to complete the required tasks?
• Are you encouraging innovation, both for product improvements and cost savings?
• Does everyone in your company understand their possibly changing role in your quest?
• Do you reinforce your targets in your day-to-day business plans?

I’ve now got plans for putting new focus onto a few ideas that will allow for targeted dives. What about you? Have you pinpointed your target?

Cheers,
Lois

Succession planning has traditionally been centralized because it was only for the top elite of the organization. As business units grow and talent development becomes more decentralized, so does the development of management. However, business units often don’t incorporate succession planning at this level because they fear their best people being taken away if they flag them as high potential.

There are many arguments for either style of succession planning and, at times, a company may really need to look at both options. Sometimes, a manager just needs to sit down and sketch out his or her vision of succession planning. Some key questions to consider include:

Managers may occasionally be asked to submit recommendations for potential layoffs or departmental transfers to fill gaps in the workforce. If potential successors for key positions are not already identified, strategic people could be misplaced during any such organizational change. (Quick product plug… this scratch-pad style independent succession planning can be done with OrgPublisher Premier.)

The organization as a whole may need the ability to centrally manage – or provide the tools to decentrally collect – the ideas of the management team for the succession or replacement planning of the entire organization. The deeper the succession planning, the less it can be managed by HR and the more decentralized it needs to be. In this case, it’s critical that the data can be seen as a big-picture map of the organization and its workforce bench strength. (Again… OrgPublisher Succession is great at this succession assignment process.)

Peter Cappelli wrote a terrific Human Resource Executive Online article, Maximizing Talent Management. One of my favorite tips from this article is:

“For example, in any set of managerial and executive jobs, there is a common set of competencies across them as well as a set that is specific to each subgroup. In terms of effectiveness and efficiency, the ideal approach is to treat the candidates as part of a common pool for as long as possible, developing all the competencies that are common across positions first and delaying those that differentiate functions and jobs until the last minute.”

Peter states, “…the biggest source of efficiency is the ability to pool the candidates and then redirect them across functions and jobs when the inevitable variations in demand occur.”

One certainty is that succession planning must be done, and it must be deep.

Cheers,
Lois

From the comfort of your desktop or conference room, you will hear first-hand from the experts how to effectively tackle some of today’s most challenging issues in HR. If you are a customer and have not yet registered, don’t let this great opportunity pass you by. Many of our customers worldwide are taking advantage of this opportunity and scheduling conference rooms for their employees. There is no limit to how many from your team can attend and best of all – it is free. Not a term you hear often these days!

Topics include:

• Using Analytics to Run your (HR) Business
• 5 Easy Steps to Better and Cleaner Data
• Succession Planning Before a Layoff
• Org Modeling and Budgeting
• And more!

Register for the Virtual Conference today!

We will miss seeing so many familiar faces this year in Dallas but expect to see them all again in 2010!

Cheers,
Lois

Follow Lois on Twitter: http://twitter.com/loismelbourne

When you can provide tools designed for specific tasks, people enjoy doing their job and they can do it much more efficiently. When data isn’t hidden or scattered, but is clearly visible and at your fingertips, getting the job done is a lot easier. We have seen merger integrations speed up by months. We have seen reductions in force modeled and handled more efficiently and with better communications. We have seen succession planning span the entire organization because individuals could be identified for positions they were not otherwise considered for; all because the right tools were available and easy to access.

Now, more than ever, is the time to work with efficiency and accuracy. Please make sure you have the right tools on your workbench.

Cheers,
Lois

From the perspective of the employer needing to do succession planning prior to Reductions of Force or a merger, the succession planning must go much deeper into the organization to guarantee that decisions don’t cripple the future of the organization. (See several January Blogs on this site.)

How are you changing your succession planning initiatives?

Cheers,
Lois

Now the trend is moving toward succession planning or replacement planning for the entire organization. This means we need to become familiar with the terms and tools available. One of the more common questions I get asked is “What is a 9-Box that I keep hearing about?” A 9-Box is a grid with which you plot employees based on their performance ranking and their potential for advancement (see graphic). It is a little like the magic quadrant that analysts use to illustrate different rankings for comparison.

MYTH TO BE BUSTED: Not every quality employee is a High Potential, High Performer employee. Yes, quality employees should be performing high. But they may not have the potential for promotion up through management. Lacking the potential to move up to management or to be an executive is not a requirement for a stellar employee with huge value to the organization. Specialists and experts in their field may not desire to manage people, but yield great results in their position. Moving ‘up’ may require re-location and that might not be in the family or life plan of an employee. Do not judge less than high potential people as anything other than not interested or ready for a move up the corporate org chart.

The traditional 9-Box should be used to focus the process of assigning successors because the individuals in the upper right quadrant have been identified as people with the potential of moving up. If your organization has gone through a formal process of identifying high potentials you may wish to begin the initiative or address the 9-Box process with management as they assess each team for successors. We are seeing some very creative uses for the 9-Box that are different than the traditional and not using the same data on the axis. If you want to learn more, let me know.

Cheers,
Lois

As companies plan for their workforce to retire over the next 5, 8, or 10 years, they must rely on the sharing of knowledge between their employees. As technology, the markets, customers, and techniques change so quickly, the ability to learn and adapt is very valuable.

So, the advice tip is keep learning and showing off your ability to learn. This can be illustrated through certifications you must study for and earn, new projects that may be out of your comfort zone, or standard  business practice, hobbies involving continual learning, etc. Maintain a hunger for taking on new tasks and learning new things. It will be noticed.

Shari, an Aquire customer, mentioned that she was very impressed with an applicant who learned as much as he could about chess in order to play a customer coming to town for product training. The customer is a tournament chess player, and the applicant wanted to give him a good, challenging game. He dove into it, took lessons and played extensively on a computer version. The customer was so impressed that this person had learned the game in such detail he wrote a letter of recommendation for this person about his ability to learn and grasp complex subjects. (The guy got the job with Shari.)
Keep learning – it makes you more interesting and much more marketable for moving into or up through the organization chart.

Cheers,
Lois

I believe what really needs to be looked at in many companies is wholesale reorganizations. The magnitude of change in the workforce demands an assessment of every inefficiency, every redundancy, and every complexity to improve productivity. This time the reorganizations would not be designed to engineer layoffs. They would be designed for the exits we’re going to experience in so many layers of our organizations. They would be creating career paths for the employees who must be retained. The reorganizations would be redesigning the way business is done.

Automation, outsourcing, and streamlining processes will be demanded of our companies. We will have to do more with less people. But the less people part lasts for a long time, not just a belt tightening exercise for Wall Street. Organizations that figure out they can improve their efficiencies and cope with the brain drain without spinning their wheels believing they just need to be the best at hiring, will benefit from appropriate scale AND the financial reward of simply being more efficient.

Reorganizations done with advance planning will be different and more strategic than ever. Evaluating the structure, spans of control, budget, and planning hierarchies, along with the succession planning and replacement planning, will help HR meet the strategic needs of the organization as the world goes into what is looking like the largest talent crunch we have ever experienced.

Cheers,
Lois

I’d like to do a deeper paper on this subject and would appreciate your feedback on the topic, as well.

Do you have succession planning on your scorecard? Have you identified those positions at risk? Have you identified all the positions in your organization that need a strategy for replacement and succession plans? Can you measure your positions that have replacement plans and those that don’t? Are you tracking the depth of your bench on your scorecard?

These types of measures are critical in making sure your business realizes its success in the future. Can you see anything on the non-financial side of your scorecard that will have a bigger impact on your business than the half of your workforce that’s going to change in the next 8 years?

I look forward to exploring this topic further with you, and I will share more of our customers’ progress, too.

Cheers,
Lois

So, why not keep managers in their positions a little longer, but give them practical experience through projects? For example, give your high potential marketing manager purchasing experience by adding them as a business expert on the new purchasing system team. Then, as they need financial experience, place them on a team analyzing the new business plan of a subsidiary.

You can do this without removing managers from their regular post. Team participation, managed well, can lead to expertise gained by the employee and, in turn, the project team gains the knowledge of the business expert. If you avoid the ‘every team member must be in every project meeting’ way of thinking, this practice can be a win-win for everyone. You can’t make the project a full time job and still expect them to maintain their regular duties, but you can certainly integrate managers into key projects.

Hint: Succession Management includes Succession Planning and a lot more.
(buy the book: http://www.amazon.com/)

But the importance of this book is its ability to provide nearly a primer on Talent Management. The authors define terms, and the book is stuffed with wonderful, practical, usable checklists for things like:
1. Talent Review Meetings
2. Talent Assessment Goals
3. Metrics you could or should use in the process

It offers up slide decks for you to present your ideas higher up in management or to business heads:
1. Explaining Succession Planning and Talent Management
2. What metrics are you needing and going to use in your succession planning

This book is a must have for anyone starting a new initiative in Talent Management, Succession Planning and Talent Review.

It can make you look good and feel like an old pro at these things, even when you are a novice.

If you are not a novice, it can still help you streamline your processes and refine your communication.

Ever wonder what to do with information that somebody is marked as a high performer or has high potential? Do you tell them? What if the situation changes? Read the book…it will tell you what to do.

Do you wonder which metrics you need to track in your succession planning? Read the book. You can also hire Ms. Sims for consulting which can include Talent Review Facilitation. www.successionbuilders.com

The authors don’t mention using OrgPublisher™ or Unifi™ for succession planning to help visualize your succession plan or to do the What-if workforce planning. But our customers are very excited about this process, so maybe we should put together a book about their uses of Aquire solutions for Succession Planning and Succession Management.