Succession planning
Finding people with the right skills to fill key and top leadership jobs, often referred to as succession planning, is becoming an increasingly complex area for many organisations.
Traditionally, large companies ran highly-structured, top-down schemes aimed at identifying internal successors for key posts and planning their career paths to provide the necessary range of experience. These schemes worked reasonably well in a stable environment where structures were fixed and careers were long-term.
However, with growing uncertainty, increasing speed of change in the business environment, and flatter structures, succession planning of this sort is in decline.
Today’s succession planning is more likely to sit inside a very much wider set of resourcing and development processes called ‘succession management’, encompassing management resourcing strategy, aggregate analysis of demand/supply (human resource planning and auditing), skills analysis, the job filling process, and management development (including graduate and high-flyer programmes).
In addition, the old succession planning was purely about organisational needs. The modern version takes account of the growing recognition that people increasingly need to make their own career decisions and to balance career and family responsibilities. So the emphasis is about balancing the aspirations of individuals with those of their employing organisations, as far as possible customising moves to meet the needs of employees, their families and the changing skill requirements of the organisation.
This is where personality profiling can bring a much needed perspective on the ‘soft’ skills analysis of potential succession candidates. It focuses on the natural preferences of people; what motivates them, how do they react to responsibility, delegation or confrontation? Are they decisive, working on gut feel or do they amass data over which to deliberate? Do you want someone similar to the previous CEO or someone completely different?
This is equally important whether the focus is on existing candidates or if someone new is being brought into the organisation. (A recent CIPD/DDI survey Global Leadership Forecast 2008-2009 shows that only 44% of leaders rate other leaders in their organisations as good or excellent.)
To help companies with this critical issue, ContactCentreRecruitment provides the ‘Senior Managers & Directors’ personality profile report which provides an insight into a candidates natural preferences in the following subject areas:
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The report is available in your account (which is free to set up), simply sign up and use the ContactCentreRecruitment profiling service. Remember ContactCentreRecruitment solutions require no consultancy or training to use – so no costs are incurred for these.
