Is Your Organization Ready for Succession Planning?

Each year around 10 to15 percent of companies appoint a new CEO due to exit of the existing person in the leadership role. In fact, in 2015 the turnover among global CEOs hit the highest records of the last 15 years as stated by Harvard Business Publishing in a post.

Yet researches show that most organizations aren’t well-prepared to replace them. 

Consequences of Poor Succession Planning

The entire business can be effected with uncertainty and chaos if the business doesn’t have a strong succession plan. The company can land up in spending huge amount for recruitment and replacement of the leaders who have turned out to be wrong fit. 

A study of the world’s 2,500 largest public companies shows that those companies which scramble to find replacements for departing CEOs forgo an average of $1.8 billion in shareholder value.

Challenges an Organization May Face in absence of a well-structured Succession Plan

The process of finding new leaders is not an easy thing and is full of challenges. The primary challenge being the identification of high performing and high potential candidates for leadership positons. Probably, that’s what make many organizations overlook the need to identify and develop potential successors to fill the leadership positions if the need arises. 

The Solution

Creating and implementing a well-structured succession plan may take months, if not years. The first step is to integrate employee development programs with the leadership succession planning. This would help to identify the high performing internal candidates early and flag them at the management level.

The next thing is to help them in developing leadership skills. To give exposure and better understanding of different business environments, put potential successors as the in-charge of new projects. This help companies to accelerate change while testing a candidate’s suitability, capability and knowledge for the top leadership position.

Empxtrack Succession Planning software facilitates the above mentioned processes.

The software supports cross-functional transfers, training and development, identification of high-potential employees, and multi-rater feedbacks for employees who are being developed as future leaders. 

Other functionalities offered by Empxtrack Succession Management software are : 

-  Allow identification of key positions in the organization.

- Map key positions with required skills, job descriptions, education,competencies, and experience profiles.

- Identify potential candidates meeting the above key position requirements.

- Integrate with Appraisal module and displays different appraisal scores, relative gradings, strengths in core competencies and more.

- Identify the high/ low potential employees with the help of 9 or 12 grid matrix.

- Collect multi-raterfeedback for the selected employees and allow viewing these feedbacks.

- Integrate succession planning tool with Training and Development module to enable viewing of training profile of the employee.

- Display achievements of the employees by integrating Rewards and Recognition module with succession management tool.

- Integrate with the HRIS module to obtain an employee’s employment history, past promotions details, qualifications and more.

- Enable product users to conduct comprehensive searches to find employees in a number of different criteria.

- Allow the definition of three succession pipelines for each Key Position viz short-term, medium-term and long-term.

- Map employees to the succession pipelines with a development plan for each employee in each pipeline.

- Notify the HR manager/ administrator if there are changes in employee profile such as exit, transfer, and promotion to allow an appropriate change in the succession pipeline.

- Provide a set of reports showing analysis of key positions, succession pipelines and development plans.

Are you ready?

While many organizations may not be able to create a perfect predictive algorithm to identify an ideal CEO successor (or any other leader), yet there still remains a long way to improve their succession planning—starting with having a succession plan in the first place and using an integrated, reliable succession planning software!