Getting Familiar With The Two Most Common Methods Of Succession Management

Addressing the talent needs of the organization in a timely manner is essential for any business to gain long term success. For this, the HR executives need to be able to anticipate the skill gaps and nominate candidates for fulfilling critical roles. They also need to pair the training and learning initiatives of the employees with various mentoring and coaching opportunities. However, performing these and various other succession planning management tasks is not that easy. This is because, the type of succession management strategy that proves most beneficial for a business, may differ from one organization to another. That is why it is not uncommon for business organizations to hire professional HR strategy consultants to provide guidance and support to their in-house HR executives.

Two Common Methods Of Succession Management

Contrary to popular belief, business organizations do not, generally, have a lot of choices when it comes to choosing the best strategy for succession management. In fact, there are only two common methods that HR professionals can opt from and these are described in brief as follows.

Replacement Planning : This method of succession management involves replacing the employees, mostly by their immediate juniors, as and when they choose to leave the organization. In this scenario, the HR professionals simply assume that the people replacing the outgoing employees would be ready, willing and capable of shouldering the enhanced responsibility. However, in most cases, such an assumption proves to be erroneous as even the best professional might need some sort of mentoring and support before they can take on a higher job role. In fact, such a sudden rise might actually reduce the performance efficiency of the employees in question and might even affect the morale of the entire team.

Talent Flow :  This is an alternative method of succession management and focuses on building talent pools after proper identification of the skills and competencies that might be required by an organization. In this method, the actual task of filling vacancies is performed in real time based on the availability of a vacancy rather than focusing on filling a specific position. According to top strategy execution consulting firms, this method of succession management is slightly more advantageous as it ensures the skills and the attitude of the candidates appropriately matches the needs for the job role.

Choosing The Best Option

Having gained basic information about both types of succession management strategies, choosing the best one as per their organization needs, becomes easier for the HR professionals. The one important thing that they need to remember before making their choice is that both these methods are not mutually exclusive. This means that HR professionals can implement both these methods if they consider it to be the best way to get desired results. In fact, the professionals providing leadership consulting services advice their clients to have a plan for both of these management strategies. This requires them to believe in the growth potential of their employees and also to invest in development activities to prepare the candidates with the right potential for their next big role. It also requires them to develop strategies focused on promoting positive talent flow within the organization.