Succession Planning Helps to Cultivate Talent

While organisations know about the value of succession planning as a tool to sustain their business models and to retain talent, many organisations still end up needing to find outside talent to fill senior positions. Lack of proper and thought out succession planning is one of the biggest challenges facing organisations. The other reason is job-hopping that put succession planning into disarray for many organisations. Circumstances change more than anticipated and whatever talent was previously identified is no longer adequate. Effective succession management is the result of cultivating the talent to populate a succession plan that works when actually applied. For this reason, it is essential that the effort is invested in cultivating talent and not merely in populating plans. The plans will be weak if the actual cultivating or growth of talented people is not strong. Organisations need to make an effort to actively cultivate talent to ensure that future talent gaps are avoided. In most organisations the immediate talent requirements cannot be adequately met from within. This creates a time demand operationally on line managers and the human resources teams supporting them to constantly be focused on external recruitment, which can be very time consuming. In addition, external placements require intensive induction and training for their new organisation and take time to become productive. Recruitment agencies offer more flexibility and can help organisations when they are pressed for time. It is time that recruiters were placed in a relationship more central to the succession planning process rather than on the margins. Most organisations leave recruiters entirely out of the succession planning process, bringing them in only at the last moment to fill urgent positions. Recruiters can help in the succession planning by; contributing to the overall talent plan and projections on a variety of possible staffing scenarios and create and maintain flexible talent pools. In a typical organisation, the cultivation period to grow talent to a first-line supervisory or specialist levels roughly takes three to five years, depending on the sector and excluding any prior formal qualifications required. So the failure to have readily available internal talent to meet current requirements is a failure of the leadership of the organisation to have identified talent with the potential to cultivate and prepare this talent for future requirements. Organisations then find themselves with limited staff and they are even less likely to begin the cultivation process. In this way the vicious cycle is perpetuated. Another concern is that the morale of employees can be affected when outside appointments are made. Organisations should strive to source and select entry-level staff that has the potential to move up the ranks of the organisation and use them as a key talent pool from where talent can be grown and cultivated.

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