Succession Planning: Say Halo, Wave Goodbye!

From an individual’s point of view, it’s worth getting value from succession planning. The process is about planning and controlling human resources into the future. The individual’s future may or may not align with organizational intentions.

Traditionally, succession planning has been focused on identifying the best people and getting them up through the organizational structure at an appropriate speed that matches organizational intentions with individual aspirations. It can work brilliantly but it can also work less brilliantly when the individuals get found out; not being capable of working at that level. The excellent work undertaken by Elliot Jacques on working levels identified that, as we mature and gain experience in the workplace, we need to be moving at an appropriate rate relative to our capacity to handle jobs and different levels. Some businesses have built their succession plans around this type of thinking. Those companies that don’t attend to this, can risk getting lost in the organizational process by pushing people too far, too fast.

The self-fulfilling prophecy is a powerful concept. Once an individual has been identified as talented, it is often case that they are seen as such for a considerable period of time. Sometimes this period of time goes on until they fail. Then the management of the once talented person in that context can be very difficult, particularly for the employee concerned.  The drop in self-esteem and in confidence can be traumatic and quite unfair for those affected.

The ‘Halo Effect’ is a well-known concept in recruitment but less well understood in succession planning. The sorts of issue that underpin the Halo Effect include “does the face fit?”--a belief that extroversion is more appropriate for potential leaders and managers than introversion, and that personality and likeability are more important than technical competence. Sometimes this may impact on who gets appointed to senior positions. All of these things are natural instincts and behaviours but may not always be appropriate in the context of succession.

Another area that employers can lose sight of is the importance of primary functions over other functions. In any business, whether it's a product or service-based entity, there are those that sell or are involved directly with the customer and there are those that deliver--any other functions are secondary to those, i.e. they support those two front end functions. The importance of this in succession terms is that the primary functions are the lifeblood of the company and when you’re planning ahead, you have to bear the criticality of having good leaders and managers in those primary functions.

As we know, the world of work has been changing fast and, if anything, is accelerating as changes occur to regulation, global organizational working, demographic effects, aging workforces and so on. It increasingly seems that T-shaped careers are going to be more prevalent. The number of jobs that we'll have throughout our career is increasing, as the shape of organizations change and the requirements of more flexible workers increase. The expectation is that anybody coming into a managerial or leader role will know something about the ecosystem, i.e. they’ll understand the sector, the segment, the type of enterprise and the type of work that it does. The deeper that understanding is the lower risk it is to the recruiting organization. Whether you're dealing with people who are more technical or more managerial in their orientation, the way that the T-shaped career works from the succession planning point of view is more lattice-like than ladder. As people move across latticed structures to gain greater knowledge and experience of their organization or sector they need to know the risks, which are increasingly heavy burdens that are put alongside the need for rounded individuals as they gain the experience, technically and managerially, that companies want.

In the primary function situation, the future leaders on the sell or customer side will want to have a lattice type progression towards leadership roles that market, sell to and serve the customer at the front-end of the business. The same may pertain on the delivery side but there also may in tandem be a technical ladder that allows the individual to go deeper and deeper into expert territory to support those on the delivery side of the organization.

Another important development over the last thirty years or so has been the professionalization of management. Whilst companies have invested, sometimes significantly, in management development training, there has been a huge growth in the number of business schools and universities that offer MBAs, particularly, and other postgraduate Masters programmes. The MBA programmes cover strategy, marketing, operations and finance. That holistic, academic and project based approach, whether it’s on a 1 or 2 year programme, gives a well-rounded view of how business and organizations are run and can be run in the future. It's why those sorts of graduate have a specific value in the minds of recruiters and employers.

Succession planning, from an organization’s viewpoint, is about what it wants now and what it wants later, the understanding of organizational capability aligned with where this business is moving to--i.e. is it organically growing or shrinking? The type of capability that the company will need must also be determined. I was speaking recently to an operations director of a fast-growing organization in the UK where they had doubled the size of their business in the previous two years and were seeking to double it again in the next 12 months. One of the key issues is whether the leaders in this business are equipped to be leaders in a company that is a very different shape to when they were first appointed. It’s not an unusual consideration that the rate of managerial growth and capability is not going fast enough to match the expectations of leaders and shareholders alike.

How you nurture talent after identifying it and how you grow it is fundamental within this context. The processes for doing that revolve typically around the performance management system--moving people on, moving people through, managing the tensions that are bound to exist there. A line manager may have to release a good person to work elsewhere in the business as part of the organization’s growth strategy. This can be hard. It can impact adversely on the manager and the team that the person leaves, so getting it right and having an impact on sustainability in this context is critical.

And how does the individual feel when all of this is going on? The process that has been described above will involve an assessment of the employee that they might feel is right or not right. They have the choice of going with it or not. There’s always a risk in moving on; there may be a bigger risk in staying put when you believe that your value, your talent is not being recognised in the same way by the organization that employs you.

Good people need a challenge--they need challenging colleagues that stretch them and they need a challenge in projects. Good succession plans based upon a lattice-based approach will allow that. Whenever key projects arrive that give you an opportunity to be stretched, they should be typically given to people within the succession planning process, so if you’re not getting your fair share of projects, it may mean your rate of learning is going slower than you believe it should. This is why succession planning is so sensitive and at the same time is important to the employee as well as to the employer.

We ask the question, who is getting the value? In a situation where this value is very organization-centric, the company is controlling timing, movement, growth, development and succession--all of these things are in the hands of the custodians of the business at that time and one can argue that it should be so. The challenge though is that if you don’t have both the key individuals that you need as part of that talent pool and a well-aligned succession planning process, the whole thing can become a bureaucratic exercise with little or no meaning.

To put it another way, if you get it right it can be one of the biggest single determinants of organizational success. It’s a good time to hire people, particularly those in middle to late career, and if you can get them it may balance the organization from a rewards perspective. Having good succession planning means individuals understanding their place and their alignment—this is mission critical for any organization.

Author:

Simon North, co-founder of Position Ignition, a late career management company for organisations and executive career consultancy for individuals. Visit the Career Advice blog for personal advice on your career.