Unconventional Succession Planning

With a highly competitive environment for talent, old methods of succession planning are no longer viable. For many companies, HR processes are not well positioned, or integrated enough to support a culture of development required to growing talent.

In order to have a sustainable advantage in the marketplace, companies need a new approach to succession planning. The reality is that getting all the right processes and systems to support a good succession management process can take time.

What is a company to do to solve the succession planning issue?

Here are various alternatives:

Manage the work and not the succession

What is succession management about? Conventional wisdom holds that succession management is meant to address, and improve the bench-strength and pipeline of talent from within. But this is narrow thinking; companies need to think outside the box. There are a range of possible options. The point of succession management is not so much about replacing the person as the need to get the work done.

There are many ways to get the work done. Is it possible to eliminate the need for the work by streamlining work processes? Shifting more work onto others? Outsourcing the work? Can you in-source the work to other workers or organisational units? What about getting suppliers or distributors or customers to shoulder more of the burden?

Whenever a pending retirement is identified, analyse the situation and select a solution. Of course, promoting from within does remain a possibility.

Tap the retiree base

One often overlooked place to get talent is within the very group who are contributing to the talent shortage in the first place - retiring workers.

Hiring people back from retirement is an option. There are many advantages in using retirees: they already know the company culture, the customer base, the work procedures, and the organisation's product and service lines.

Furthermore, they should require minimum training and are already walking around with the organisation's collective institutional memory in their heads, and that knowledge is invaluable in its own right.

The key to effectively utilising the retiree base is to be flexible and creative. Some examples of how they are utilised include:

• Coaching - If your company is forced to promote from within, and the replacement is not really ready for the job, you can hire his or her predecessor to coach the person. This does not need to be face-to-face, but over-the-phone. In this way, retirees are "on call" - but are not overburdened with needing to be available on a regular work schedule.
  
  
• Virtual work - Not all work requires an onsite presence. Retirees may contribute work (or a portion of it) virtually.
  
  

In order to make best use of retirees, the employer must become much more active in keeping in touch with them, finding out what their skills are, what they want to do, how much they want to do, and what they want to get out of it.

There is no one model for succession planning and there are no hard-and-fast rules. While every organisation is different what is indisputable is that all organisations need leaders with a range of experience. Addressing the pending succession crisis is going to require creative thinking.

JJ Thakar, Capital H Group. Capital H Group is a consulting firm that takes a value-based approach to helping companies manage, and invest in, their human capital. Partnering with our clients, we focus on creating value through their people. For further information, visit web site: www.capitalHgroup.com
First published: 6 November 2006.
Last updated: 6 November 2006.