Competency­Based Succession Planning ::

Identifying and Preparing Replacements for Key Jobs

Consulting, Systems Design & Training

The objective of succession planning is to provide senior management with a system for providing and identifying a pool of ready replacements for key jobs, and to provide professionals with a clearly defined career path and a process to optimize their advancement. We help organizations develop and implement these systems.

Succession planning is an ongoing system of selecting competent employees ready to move into key jobs in the organization, should these become vacant. Job­person matches are made between existing employees and future jobs they might assume. These future jobs are usually higher level positions. But, succession planning may be for key jobs above, at the same level, or even below the job an employee now holds. Increasingly, succession planning is for lateral job moves (e.g., to a different function, project team, or geography).

The usual criteria for a successful succession planning system include:

• One, preferably two, well­qualified internal candidates are identified as ready to assume any key job should it become vacant.
• A record of successful promotions (or other job placements).
• Few superior performers leave the organization because of "lack of opportunity."'

Competency-based succession planning systems identify the competency re­quirements for critical jobs, assess candidate competencies, and evaluate possible job-person matches. Career path "progression maps" identify key "feeder" jobs for lateral or higher level "target" positions within a job family or across job families.

A competency­based succession planning system assesses how many em­ployees in which feeder jobs have (or have the potential to develop) the competencies to perform well in key target jobs. There are two ways of doing this.

The first is to compare the competencies of people in the feeder job with the competency requirements of the target job.

The second is to compare the competency requirements of the feeder job and the target job.

Competency-Based Succession Planning: What, Why, and How

What a competency-based approach is and does, its impact on individual and organizational results, organizational issues addressed, situations best served by a competency­based approach, and steps to implementing… More