{"id":1680,"date":"2010-10-06T01:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-10-06T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/?p=1680"},"modified":"2010-06-28T09:30:47","modified_gmt":"2010-06-28T17:30:47","slug":"why-cant-we-implement-succession","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/?p=1680","title":{"rendered":"Why Can’t We Implement Succession?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I can\u2019t quite remember when it was, but on a recent Bill Kutik Radio Show<\/a>, Bill mentioned, \u201cOne of the things that drives me crazy, is every survey that comes out, everyone says that Succession Planning is their top priority, and then the following year, the same survey states that nobody implemented it.\u201d\u00a0 Bill\u2019s absolutely right, and I\u2019ve started wondering exactly what is so hard about Succession Planning that with all the best intentions, we just can\u2019t seem to get moving on that front of talent management.<\/p>\n

I have a theory that there are a couple of pillars that make us unable to implement it.\u00a0 First of all, there are core capabilities that need to be created before we can get Succession in place.\u00a0 While we can often think of Succession as a stand alone process from the rest of talent management, Succession certainly needs a few ingredients to work.\u00a0 Fist of all, we want to be able to create plans based on actual measurements rather than the reviewer\u2019s subjective opinions which we know would result in a high probability of bias and be subject more to potential successors networking capabilities than job capabilities (although this may not be a terrible thing).\u00a0 What we need are a few years worth of performance and competency data.\u00a0 This means that to have a quantitative means of measuring probable successors, we\u2019d like to see trends and trajectory.\u00a0 This can go not only for internal candidates since external candidates often have measurable indicators that may be public.\u00a0 The core problem however, is that not only do we need the basics of talent management intact, but we also would like to have a few years worth of data.<\/p>\n

Second, there is a distinct manager capability that is far beyond that of other talent processes.\u00a0 In performance management, our managers are asked to measure direct employees on a specified set of performance parameters.\u00a0 When we talk about succession plans, we are often asking our executives to look at possible successors that they don\u2019t directly work with today.\u00a0 They look at the capabilities of each candidate, level those candidates across the multiple business units, look at total experience, expertise and capability, and then look at potential.\u00a0 Succession or our executives is far more complex than performance is for our managers.\u00a0 We have an expectation that we can put in software and a process, but once we come down to the actual planning process for implementation, we realize that this is far more complex and the expectations are far higher than anything we have done before.<\/p>\n

Usually what we think will happen is that HR will run all sorts of reports that show possible successors for each role, and be able to analyze those candidates so that meaningful conversations can be had with the appropriate successors.\u00a0 We think this because we don\u2019t really believe that a bunch of executives is going to sift through complex, detailed data on each possible successor.\u00a0 However, this also means that the business process for Succession Planning is more complex than just the analysis.\u00a0 In performance, we have a pretty reliable expectation that managers can figure it out.\u00a0 In Succession, we have every reason to believe that HR business partners and leaders are going to have a series of meetings with executives to reach a final understanding of what the succession landscape looks like \u2013 and most of this happens outside of software.<\/p>\n

When we really get down to it, Succession probably really is our greatest want and need.\u00a0 When we get down to it, Succession really is more complex than we expect it to be.\u00a0 However, we need to get succession right.\u00a0 If we think Succession is bad, wait until we get to topics like workforce mobility and areas that are so cross functional and multi-threaded that we have multiple HR organizations interacting with multiple business organizations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I can\u2019t quite remember when it was, but on a recent Bill Kutik Radio Show, Bill mentioned, \u201cOne of the things that drives me crazy, is every survey that comes out, everyone says that Succession Planning is their top priority,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1692,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[37,27,49,20],"tags":[110,207,237,122,444],"class_list":["post-1680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-change-management","category-data-metrics","category-talent","category-talent-management","tag-bill-kutik","tag-competency","tag-manager-capability","tag-succession-planning","tag-talent-management"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1680"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1680\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1693,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1680\/revisions\/1693"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}