So what happens when we intentionally blend succession plans and individual development plans across all roles in the business, not just leadership roles? Great things happen, that’s what.
Let’s look at succession plans first.
If you’ve got succession plans in place for your leadership team and a handful of key roles, you’re missing out on a massive opportunity to build positive employee engagement across the board.
According to LinkedIn’s 2018 Workforce Learning Report:
94% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their career and Manager involvement is a critical ingredient to increase employee engagement with learning.
As an employee, how does having my own succession plan make me feel more engaged?
- It’s an acknowledgement that it does matter if no one is there to do my job and this makes me feel like I make an important contribution to the team;
- It’s a chance for me to coach someone else and share my experiences on what does and doesn’t work;
- Being able to take leave is less stressful because I know that someone else is able to look after my work while I’m away; and
- If a great internal promotion opportunity comes up I know there are options for other people to step into my role so I won’t be held back because I’m needed more where I am now.
And how do employees feel about being part of someone else’s succession plan?
- It feels great to be considered good enough to step into a more senior or more technically challenging role;
- This makes me feel like it’s worth battling through some of the tough situations because there is a real opportunity to learn and progress my career.
LinkedIn’s 2018 Workforce Learning Report
But how do we decide who needs a succession plan?
Traditionally this effort has been focussed on “emerging leaders” and “subject matter experts”, key roles where significant loss in IP would cause impacts to business continuity. But are these roles the only roles that fall prone to unplanned absences or that have a critical impact if left vacant for more than 4 weeks? Are these the only roles that incur recruitment and training costs? Is it only worth investing in career development for a subset of people? And what’s your succession plan for the succession plan pool?
Having succession plans in place across all roles in the team is a useful leadership approach
- Minimise disruption in the business:
- Forward planning for planned vacancies (e.g. long service leave, parental leave, annual leave, career progression); or
- Risk mitigation for unplanned vacancies (e.g. attrition, sick leave, jury duty);
- Engage employees with genuine individual development plans that are backed up with coaching and mentoring opportunities. This shows that a genuine career path exists and will motivate people to stick around, helping in retention of business IP; and
- Reduce the costs of recruitment and training to fill vacated roles by having clarity on what roles really need to be recruited, if the ideal back-fill is contract or permanent and whether the role can be filled through internal promotion.
So what if we were to intentionally link individual development plans and succession plans?
An individual development plan is the start and all employees should have one. It’s important to create clarity around what behaviours and skills are expected as someone progresses through development in that role. This provides actionable steps for learning and development activities both on the job and through formal training. But the individual development plan becomes truly genuine when it can be positioned as a pathway towards a role that someone else is doing now (i.e. as part of that person’s succession plan) or a role that is about to emerge (more on this in another article about building capability from within).
An individual development plan AND a succession plan for everyone in the business would be ludicrous!
Not if you can develop an efficient and repeatable way to do so.
By finding relationships between functions in your business and the roles within each function you can really efficiently design succession (and development plans) for all roles within the functions. Mapping the roles that would logically progress to other roles provides a basic succession planning map across your teams. The role specific development plans create the basis for the individual development plan, tailored as needed for each employee.
Here are our tops for how to create an efficient and repeatable link between individual development plans and succession plans:
- Be clear on your E2E Workflow, the functions and the roles that support different activities;
- Create role specific development plans that define the competency levels within each role, clearly stating the criteria for each level;
- For each role, identify the roles across the business that are logical next steps and use these to guide the learning activities in each individual development plan; and
- Include in each individual development plan an individual succession plan for that person.
LinkedIn’s 2018 Workforce Learning Report