Succession Planning
How do some sports coaches build winning teams year after year? The answer lies in Succession Planning--assessing the current team, identifying future needs, developing a recruitment plan, providing retention incentives, and developing team leaders. The same principles apply in a business model for any consistently successful work team.
The first step to any Succession Planning project is to review your current skill sets and look for potential gaps that may already exist or soon arise. You can accomplish this by just color-coding and annotating an organizational chart. Take a look at this example.
Traditional approaches to Succession Planning involved closed door meetings to assess upper management candidates to succeed retiring upper management personnel. The newer planning models involve the entire workforce to develop for any number of management jobs.
To effectively prepare for the future, you will need to think about your
organization's current culture and define its ideal culture. What are the
competencies needed today and in the future for the critical positions?
This section of the Manager's Toolkit will help guide your thinking toward
this planning. You may want to use our planning 
tool,
or click on a topic below for a closer look at key stages in Succession
Planning.
