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One design decision many practitioners consider when implementing succession planning is whether to plan by specific role or talent pool. With role-based succession, you identify people as successors for a specific role. With pool-based succession, you develop people around shared capabilities that apply across multiple roles. Neither approach is automatically better; it depends on what your organization needs and how it operates. In many cases, the answer is both. Consider a retail organization with hundreds of store General Manager roles. For broader store operations, a pool-based approach may make more sense, since managing a separate plan for each similar role may not be realistic. However, for flagship locations with larger P&L responsibility, brand visibility, or strategic importance, a role-specific plan may be more appropriate. To help practitioners think through this decision, I’ve created a one-page cheat sheet to stimulate ideas. Since succession planning is as much art as science, the cheat sheet serves as a starting point, not a prescribed formula, to spark discussions that help determine the mix of approaches that best enables effective planning within your specific business context. These are the type of topics we discuss in my private community for internal HR practitioners, Talent Edge Circle.
