Succession Planning: Defining Critical Positions and Competencies

Succession planning is about helping organizations look at their leadership risks and needs. This includes addressing both employees moving within your organization and employees in the process of moving on to other opportunities.

Defining Critical Positions and Competencies

In succession planning, a key question is “what roles are you going to need to fill because of retirement, flight-risk or growth?” This question helps companies identify their critical positions. For example, let’s say after analyzing your current growth rate, we know that to keep pace, you’re going to need six new general managers a year.

Then after defining the critical positions, your next step is to define those competencies -- both technical and leadership -- that will be needed in each next-level role. In other words, what roles need to be filled and what competencies do emerging leaders need to develop to be successful in those roles.

Gauging Emerging Leaders

Once you have those next-level competencies defined, it’s time to assess your pool of emerging leaders and gauge where they are developmentally. You have to ask:

• Are they ready now?

• Will they be ready in two years?

• Will they not be ready for another five years?

• How far off are they from being able to seamlessly fill the critical positions?

Then you need to define what you can do in that in-between time to get them to where they need to be developmentally.

A system commonly used for identifying employee readiness is called, “red, green, yellow lighting”:

• Green indicates an employee is developmentally ready now to fill a next-level position, should a manager depart tomorrow.

• Yellow indicates he needs 18 months to three years to get where he needs to be.

• Red indicates it will probably be more than three years before he’s ready.

So, you look at your pipeline of talent, and you say, “We know Employee A is going to be a good project manager someday, so let’s assess her current developmental level.” With the understanding of what she needs to be a good project manager, the hard skills, the technical skills and the competencies, you then rank her on her current level of development. So if you know you need a project manager to be a 5 at managing and measuring work on a scale of 1 to 5, you want to look at where she’s at now.

Formulating Developmental Plans

Once you’ve figured out where an employee is and where he needs to be to succeed in the next-level role you can’t just say “we’re going to promote him in a couple of years, and boy we hope he’s ready.” You need to make and follow a professional development plan to ensure he’ll be ready.

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