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Discussion on: Management Succession Planning and why is it most important for career management

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Angel Paudel

Succession planning is used by the leaders and HR managers to identify the strategy to replace key roles within the organization in case if the person holding a key position leaves the job, retires or dies (Armstrong, 2014). The process of succession planning includes of identifying the employees with the potential to be promoted to a senior position. The planning also involves how the organization communicate about the role change and how it plans to train and develop potential candidates. If a company doesn’t have a backup plan of replacement with the use of succession plan, the organization may have to leave one of the most critical role vacant for a long period of time than they’ll like to. This may cause the organization losing their direction and being unable to meet different business objectives, keeping the entire organization at a huge risk (Tolstoy, 1986).

HR Managers work closely with the organization’s board of directors to make a succession plan. This form of plan benefits the organization greatly as it provides the organizational leaders with a clear process to go through when one of the crucial role of in the organization becomes vacant. This helps in minimizing the risk of key roles being vacant for long period (Systems, 2011). Also, as the plan helps identify such candidate who has already been groomed to do the job, it removes the need for a new hiring to learn the organization process and job demand which often takes several months and more of a person’s time which could slow down hampering business direction and goals. This helps find the right replacement who is trained for the position in case of need in a very short period of time making sure that the company doesn’t slow down even during these time.

The succession plan also helps the existing employees of the organization as it provides them with an opportunity to be promoted to a senior level from within the organization if they have the right set of skills required. This provides the employees to become future leaders if the employees can take the opportunity for professional development and if the company promotes senior leaders from within.

Senior staff members of any organization hold a very key position that would be critical to an organization’s operations. In any case, if the senior staff leaves, the skills they had goes with them as well, which can make it difficult to replace them quickly with people who are equally qualified. This is where succession planning comes in place to ease the overall transaction process and by making sure that the organization has a replacement in hand by promoting someone from within who is trained and groomed for similar situation.

References

Armstrong, L. A. (2014). A Handbook of Human Resource Management Practice, 13th Edition. Kogan Page Limited.

Systems, S. (2011). 5 Tips to Effective Succession Planning. SSRN Electronic Journal .

Tolstoy, L. (1986). Succession planning. Planning Review , 14 (3), 47-47.