What is a succession plan

The succession plan is a way of planning the future of employees within the company.

Not having this planning jeopardizes the success of the business, as it can cause a lack of agility to fill critical vacancies, increase the turnover level and even jeopardize the achievement of goals.

Drawing up a succession plan means planning your company’s future and boosting talent retention.

Therefore, in this article you will understand everything about what a succession plan is and how to do it in practice in your organization.

More about succession plan

The succession plan, also known as succession planning, is the process that identifies and develops the individual skills and capabilities of employees to assume more strategic positions within the company.

That is, it concerns the positions that make up the organization’s hierarchy, as well as the possible professional paths that a person may have to enable the best use of that talent to execute the strategy .

The succession plan is a way to plan and map deviations from a career plan. But what does that mean? That it is possible to identify the competencies of each assignment, planning promotions, dismissals, training and feedback meetings.

With this succession planning, a clear definition of the essential requirements to exercise each function and the necessary skills to occupy the positions in the hierarchy in the business is built.

Thus, they are crucial to identify positions and critical skills in the company and a powerful tool to ensure the evolution of the staff in organizations.

What are the objectives?

The succession plan makes the company’s purpose clear. It also allows greater predictability of people management processes and a shared vision.

In addition, it anticipates changes that impact both the organization and the employees themselves.

Especially because one of the great difficulties faced by companies is the retention of talent and the development of skills for executing the strategy. This is due to several factors, such as:

• Lack of alignment between employee expectations and organizational objectives;
• Difficulty mapping people’s skills;
• Lack of convergence between targets and indicators;
• Problems with motivation and perspective of professional growth.

In this context, the succession plan emerges as a solution with the main objective of identifying the potential of employees and using this information in the strategic definition of staff adjustments.

So, the business becomes resistant to time and the changes that can happen.

The difference between a career plan and a succession plan

The career plan is a way of guiding employees in terms of their professional and personal development within the organization. The succession plan is an “upgrade” in this plan.

In order to make it possible for the existence of the career plan, such as an organizational chart and process, to be converted into a strategic analysis of the development and promotion of people, it is essential to analyze the skills, performance and results delivered by each one. This means assessing issues such as the relationship between potential and risk of its employees.

By getting to know its team in depth through performance evaluation practices, feedback, pulse and climate surveys, the company stops behaving passively and HR now has tools to actively position itself in situations such as:

• Definition of substitutes in case of vacations, area changes or shutdowns;
• Lighter and more assertive leadership transitions;
• Transparency in all internal selection processes;
• Mapping of training for employees to assume specific responsibilities.

In this way, it is possible to implement the succession plan in parallel with the career plan and provide greater predictability to job changes and people development.

The benefits of the plan for strategic positions

Some points must be emphasized when thinking about planning the future of people and the company. After all, it is reasonable to think that predictable environments make processes more stable, and this benefits both parties involved.

Or even because they assume that the mapping of employees ready to assume higher positions is automatic and easy to identify. Often, however, there are no tools and reports that allow reaching this conclusion.

Companies that do not have a clear roadmap to show employees run the risk of entering a spiral of stagnation, in which professionals feel unmotivated and disengaged from their work.

Additionally, it cannot be expected that there will be a need to relocate people to act. Since this generates anxiety and loss of productivity for both the HR team and the teams involved in the process.

Imagine, for example, that a manager of a product area leaves the company, or that it is necessary to fire someone, or change a person to another area. Who will take that position?

What is the impact of this on the execution of the team’s tasks? Having these answers beforehand is a huge advantage! The succession plan emerges, then, as a tool for motivation, predictability and transparency of HR processes, enabling clearer communication for all involved.

How does a succession plan work?

Each succession plan is unique, as it depends on specific factors in its planning, structure and execution.

In order to draw up a good succession plan, it is necessary to analyze the organizational structure and understand well the strategic and risk positions.

To help with this construction, some questions can be asked to help understand the current scenario of the company, for example:

• Which employees stand out and deserve a promotion?
• Are people allocated to exert the greatest potential according to their competencies?
• Which people need individual development plans (IDPs) ?
• Who are those who are unmotivated and at risk of disconnecting?
• Are there people with low productivity who are not committed to business results?

By collecting this information, the creation of the organizational succession plan becomes more targeted and assertive.

How to make a succession plan

The implementation of a succession plan depends on some operational processes and on the ingrained culture of thinking about the company’s future.

It is essential that this process be based on analytics, that is, on data collection to effectively know the company’s employees and positions.

This is the only way to be assertive in mapping the skills needed for each of them.

Then confirm some essential procedures to think about succession and future planning in people management:

• Data about your employees, which can be collected through robust performance reviews and digital surveys;
• Development of feedback practices , which make clear the company’s expectations in relation to employees;
• Objective reports based on data (not on subjective analyses) that allow for more transparency in communication and decision making – this is one of the premises of people analytics ;

Any succession plan that does not have data-driven assessment, climate survey, and feedback cycles inevitably has the chance of being a long shot.