Succession Planning

Succession planning is a process whereby an organization or firm ensures that employees are recruited and developed to fill each key role within the company. Succession planning ensures that an organization can fill key roles from within the organization itself. Succession planning enables a firm to identify talented employees and provide education to develop them for future higher level and broader responsibilities. Succession planning helps firms build bench strength. It is a process whereby an organization ensures that employees are recruited and developed to fill each key role within the organization itself. Through a firm's succession planning process, a firm recruits superior employees, develops their knowledge, skills, and abilities, and prepares them for advancement or promotion into ever more challenging roles.

Through the succession planning process, firms also retain superior employees because they appreciate the time, attention, and development that firms are investing in them. To effectively do succession planning in an organization, a firm or organization must identify its long term goals. It is necessary to identify and understand the developmental needs of a firm's employees. A firm must ensure that all key employees understand their career paths and the roles they are being developed to fill. There is a need to focus resources on key employee retention. There is also a need to be aware of employment trends in a firm's area to know the roles a firm will have a difficult time filling externally. If leadership development is not enough of a priority for the company to establish goals and track progress against those goals, it will be difficult to make any succession planning process work. Second, the act of engaging with senior executives to establish these goals will build support for succession planning and ownership for leadership development. Third, these results will also help guide future efforts and mid-course corrections.