How Succession planning benefits to companies in skill shortage period

Succession planning can be elucidated as an organization’s brilliant tactics to deal with crisis of talent as well as inevitable loss may occur in future. Multinational companies with succession plans have created contingencies to effectively combat with present and future losses.

Simple putting from management angle, succession planning denotes to right people at the right time. It is a continual process of recognizing future experts and business leaders in a company and develop them in order to effectively play the leadership role in skill shortage period.

In the age of globalization and intense monetary challenges, business leaders face lots of issues to achieve their goals. Identifying great talent and retaining good staff is top most issues for all types of companies in today’s competitive business environment. In knowledge driven economy, companies have fear of this brain drain and suspect that when qualified professionals quit then how they will create the next leader. Major challenge for companies is to recognize, develop and retain the talented executives or managers. Therefore a succession plan offers the clear roadmap to accomplish these objectives.

Plethora of management reports revealed the high significance of succession planning. The process of succession planning includes reviewing the company’s strategic plan, comprehending the existing workforce, forecasting future trends and developing employees in a structured plan to replace leaders as they retire or depart from their company.

Fundamental steps of succession planning are as under:

-       Asses the organization

-       Determine key position

-       Identify competencies of key position

-       Identify and assess the candidate

-       Create development plan

-       Measure, monitor, report and revise

Replacement hiring is a reactive process to fill an immediate need whereas succession planning is proactive and work to address. There are solid major grounds to implement succession planning in organization. Succession planning takes the additional time needed to ensure that the design aligns with organization’s strategic plans and goals. Succession planning is more flexible and allow companies to focus on selecting the best candidates for the position. Succession planning exhibits long term commitment to the organization. It works to integrate itself with other human resource activities. In real sense, succession planning is a division of workforce planning. The main purpose of succession planning is to prepare companies for the challenges and opportunities associated with changes in critical key positions. It creates standard for the qualifications and competencies that future leaders and managers need to have if they are going to lead the organization in future. Succession planning prevents the issue of losing the talent.

In final words, succession planning has great advantages for the good health of company. Currently succession planning is accepted as an effective practice to replace leaders and critical employees at various levels of all types of organizations for the need before it exists.