Employee Development: The Key to Successful Succession Planning

Your company’s biggest asset is your people. They bring your products and services to life every day for your clients. The best performers move on quickly if they don’t see opportunities to grow and advance. Unfortunately, when they transition to a new position or, even worse, leave your company altogether, they leave a difficult hole to fill. Fortunately, you can prepare for this inevitability by creating a comprehensive succession plan. Let’s look at how employee development can support successful succession planning.

What is Succession Planning, and Why is it Vital?

Before we get into the nuts and bolts of succession planning, we need a working definition. Succession planning is the practice of identifying and growing top talent so that they can be ready to fill critical position vacancies as they arise. The process is important because if essential roles go unfilled, the company could lose its stability and competitive advantage. Succession planning is a continuous activity that focuses on the long-term good of the firm so that it preserves vital institutional knowledge and supports momentum.

The Succession Planning Process

Each step of the succession planning process could have its own article, but for our purposes, here’s a brief overview:

• Step One: List the most critical roles at all levels of the organization. If these roles go unfilled, company operations would be severely disrupted.
• Step Two: Review the job descriptions for each of the roles identified. Be sure they include the knowledge, skills, and abilities required to be successful in the position.
• Step Three: Identify top performers that could be put into these roles. Gauge their interest and discuss their career goals.
• Step Four: Determine what, if any, gaps each team member has between their present capabilities and the necessary capabilities for the new position.
• Step Five: Create a professional development program for each employee within the succession plan to fill any identified gaps.
• Step Six: Assess and repeat the process. The work is never done, but it can be refined as you see what's effective and what isn't.

Now that we’ve defined the key steps in creating and implementing a succession plan, let’s take a closer look at employee development’s role.

How Employee Development Facilitates a Solid Succession Plan

The two main components of succession planning are identifying top-performing employees and then developing them further. While getting the right people into the plan is important, what you do with them afterward is more so. Bright, eager employees will still fail in their new roles if they don’t have the proper development and training before making the transition. As a leader, it’s your responsibility to ensure they’re ready for that next challenge.

An employee development program should be tailored to each person, accounting for their strengths, weaknesses, and preferred learning styles. While each program can and should be different, some common components include:

• Mentorship from management and peers to gain skills and confidence.
• Job shadowing to see what the new role will entail.
• Training for specific job-related skills.
• Formal education (when it makes sense) to develop background knowledge.
• Hands-on projects to apply what’s been learned.
• Networking to meet and learn from other people in the industry.

When your program is effective, you’ll have a full bench of leaders and top performers to call on when needed. And since workers crave development opportunities, you’ll also have increased morale and reduced turnover. According to Willis Towers Watson, over 70% of “high-retention-risk” employees want to leave because they see no future advancement in the current job. With a focus on these elements of employee development and creating opportunities for career advancement, more of your human capital will stay within the organization. An additional positive outcome is strengthening your culture. Developing and promoting effective leaders from within creates more cohesion across teams when everyone is familiar and confident in the skills and traits of the new leaders.

How Omnia Can Help

Omnia can help you jumpstart your succession planning process - and keep it moving in the right direction for years to come. We’ve created a talent assessment that will identify which of your employees has what it takes to be promoted or transferred to a new role. You’ll also learn about each team member’s communication style and learning preferences. That way, you can give them an employee development experience that’s unique to them and sure to result in professional growth.

The talent assessment is fast for employees to take and easy to administer. We need just ten minutes of their time. Then, you receive detailed reports you can use to create your comprehensive, data-driven succession plan.

Final Thoughts

What happens today is important, and businesses must operate effectively in the here and now. To do that indefinitely, you must keep one eye on the future. Succession planning is a critical, long-term effort for business continuity as personnel changes are made. A talent assessment from Omnia can help you weather those changes and continue to thrive. Contact us to get started today.

Speak to the Author!

Have an article specific question or want to continue the conversation? Now you can! Contact the author directly through the short form below and Keather Snyder will respond to your query. If you have a more general question please use our chat function, call 800.525.7117, or visit our contact us page and we'll have a subject matter expert answer your questions.