Monday, January 18, 2010

If I win the lottery...

When discussing succession planning, people often talk about who would step in for someone if they were "hit by a bus". I've always preferred to ask what would happen if someone won the lottery. A slightly brighter picture. ;)

A little while back, Phil suggested a post on "succession planning and development". Within the organization I lead we have a goal this year to formalize this process, so the timing is good to share some thoughts and get your input.
  1. Keep it simple - especially in the beginning of the process. No need to create a detailed filtering criteria for who should/shouldn't be nominated for development. The more gates at this stage of the process the less likely it is that people will nominate anyone. Focus on executing a simple set of steps, not spending a bunch of time planning and filtering without ever talking to the people who need development
  2. Make a quick list of people to develop. My company has a great method for doing this. Start by enumerating all the positions reporting to you and then for each one list people you can think of who are "ready now", "1-2 years", and "3-5 years" away from being able to take on those roles
  3. Put more names in your list. Think about your network outside just the people who are currently in your direct reporting line. Look within the company, outside the company, at customers, and prior employees. Anyone you've worked with who was impressive.
  4. Now that you have a list, let people know they're in the list! This is something that doesn't happen routinely, but I've found can yield great benefits, both immediate and longer term. Even if you think someone won't be interested in the role you'd be surprised how good they may feel to hear "you're listed in our succession plans as a person we think would be great at doing my role".
  5. Now that people know they're in the list, start with just two actions for everyone in the list:
    - delegate one significant responsibility to them
    - set up a formal mentoring relationship for them
  6. Measure the outcomes. Set up some simple metric which focuses on the outcomes, not the process. For example, "number of promotions from within the succession list each year"
  7. Repeat often. Set regular milestones to review the list, the metric, and the actions for each person in the list

Now over to you - what have you seen work? What didn't go so well? Any references that you've found valuable?

Some references that you may find useful:

4 comments:

  1. I found Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan's book "Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done" to be an excellent source providing many good ideas and real world examples of preparing future leaders. It also provides great information on combining the people component with both strategy and operations to bring about excellence in a company.

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  2. Mark, I’m currently enrolled in Northeastern University’s Executive MBA program. One of the classes I’m currently taking is Strategic Human Resources taught by professor Len Glick. At my latest class, we discussed this very topic. Here are some ideas that came out of our class for your consideration:

    1. Ask employees to do something different.
    2. Put them on the spot.
    3. Raise your expectations/standards.
    4. Have people teach, present, report.
    5. Delegate decisions.
    6. Assign people to task forces.
    7. Share the managing work.
    8. Fill in for someone else temporarily.
    9. Rotate/Swap jobs.
    10. Challenge the employee with real work – “Stretch assignments”

    We also had a guest lecturer, Larry Israelite, VP of Human Resource Development at Liberty Mutual, who discussed training, learning and development, and leadership development. He published a book that may be worth reading. It is “Talent Management: Strategies from Six Leading Companies”. You can view the table of contents on Amazon’s website. I haven’t read it yet, but it looks very interesting, particularly related to your goal to formalize the process.

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  3. With this another key component is regularly providing details on how the prospective candidate can better prepare for the day that succession occurs. By doing this, not only is the “mentor” responsible for keeping track of where the candidate is in their development, but they are actively engaged with the candidate for tomorrow. With various organizations and conferences I have been to in the past, it has been shown that a more thoroughly (better) trained workforce is more apt to be able to meet the changing business requirements that confront organizations in the 21st century. With this, these individuals are not only better equipped to “take over” through succession, but they might acquire an ownership mentality. This mentality enables them to see things from the “big picture” perspective and as they move through the process of succession, or remain in their current role, they have better insight into the “hows” and “whys” of things that happen within the organization.

    Another benefit of having a more capable workforce is that productivity increases. With this increase, other competitive advantages come into play. These advantages come from increased output, the ability to produce (product, service) at a cost savings to the customer, the ability to adapt to changing demands more quickly, etc. While these benefits usually do not present in the short term, if the company is planning for tomorrow instead of today, this provides them with a long term ability to consistently perform at a high level and remain viable within the global market.

    There is an interesting post on http://www.businessknowhow.com/manage/whyquit.htm that relates to several ideas you presented in this post.

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  4. Great posts all. I've got myself a copy of "Execution" on the way, and took all the input into a workshop done recently with my team. I'm really happy with the output of the workshop, which has put in place tangible action plans for some of the high performers in our team and which definitely will set up the organization to be "a more capable workforce" and more productive over all.

    To summarize what we did at the workshop - we kept it simple. First we reviewed a list of tools that could be used to develop people (many of which were from this blog). Started with the list of high potential people already identified for the organization, and then had their managers put together an action plan using the tools identified (or other creativity). Tried to focus on projects and mentoring rather than just coursework, which many of us had already identified as being less effective. The result was time-based action plans which each leader will be held accountable to work and develop with their people.

    Thank you for helping make this happen!

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