You can also access this resource, and many others, in Issue 368 of my Talent Edge Weekly newsletter.
Organizations spend a lot of time and resources identifying and developing successors for critical roles. Yet many of these plans can become names on a page that never turn into successors. When this happens, we get a false sense of succession depth, meaning the plan shows more successors than we really have. We may have kept people on a plan long after their readiness stopped progressing, listed the same person on several plans without deliberately developing them for any of those roles, added names based on opinion without validation, or never confirmed that the successor is even interested in the role. Part of addressing this is challenging ourselves and the decision makers who are part of the discussions to critically evaluate those named on a succession plan. For example, when someone has been on a plan for multiple cycles with no change in readiness, at what point do they get removed from the succession plan? If a person is on several plans and those roles open at the same time, which one would we most likely place them in? To help, I created a one-page reference sheet with questions organized into five themes. Four of them test the names already on the succession plan, and the fifth looks for hidden candidates who are not on the plan but should be considered. Each theme includes questions to ask, insights HR practitioners can bring to the discussions, and a possible action. While no approach is perfect, asking these questions helps close the gap between the number of names on the plan and the number of realistic successors.
