Simple Tools to Facilitate Planning for People

Simple Tools to Facilitate Planning for People
By William J. Rothwell, Ph.D., SPHR

Human resource (HR) management practitioners and workplace learning and performance (WLP) practitioners in many organizations are heeding the calls of organizational leaders to coordinate planning to prepare for possible losses of highly talented people to retirement, death, or disability. At the same time that unemployment rates in the U.S. are on the increase due to a general business downturn, organizational leaders are concerned about how to replace key people or key positions as Baby Boomers prepare for retirement. Many HR and WLP practitioners are looking for ways to expedite replacement planning, management succession planning, knowledge transfer from more to less experienced workers, and social contact transfer from more to less socially well-connected workers. As they do so, many throw up their hands and express frustration that it will take too long, and be too complicated, to do.

But what is replacement planning, and what tool can make it easier to do? What is management succession planning, and what tool can make it easier to do? What is technical succession planning, and what tool can make it easier to do? And, finally, what is social relationship succession planning, and what tool can make it easier to do? This short article addresses these questions.

What Is Replacement Planning, and What Tool Can Make It Easier?
Replacement planning is sometimes confused with management succession planning, though they are quite different. Replacement planning assumes that the organization chart will remain unchanged, and it seeks backups from within the organization—and often within the same division or department—for each key position. Back ups are chosen on the basis of which individuals are best equipped to take the place of their immediate supervisors, if only on a short-term basis while a thorough internal and external search is conducted to identify the most qualified person to fill a vacancy.

The simple tool shown in Exhibit 1 can be used to facilitate replacement planning. Starting at the top of the organization, replacement charts can be prepared for each group. A replacement chart can thus be prepared for CEO and his or her immediate reports. The replacement charts can then be cascaded as far down the organization as leaders wish to go.

“Rank” refers to a listing of most qualified people, with rank = 1 signifying the most qualified internal candidate. “Name” of course refers to the name of the person, and “readiness” indicates how well prepared an individual is to assume higher-level responsibility. Readiness is usually rated as RN (ready now), R1 (ready in up to 6 months with proper coaching and development), and R2 (ready in up to 1 year with proper coaching and development).
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Of course, replacement planning is far from ideal. It leaves to managers the chore of identifying their own replacements, and that is why these confidential charts are usually reviewed by all managers at one level and their immediate supervisor to validate them. Still, replacement charts are imperfect solutions because the criteria used to determine promotability are left up to each manager. But they are better than nothing, and they do launch conversations about what talent exists in case of emergency and how much bench strength the organization actually has.

What Is Management Succession Planning, and What Tool Can Make It Easier?
Management succession planning focuses on identifying leaders for each organizational unit. Its key focus is thus the manager of each level of the organization, starting at the top with the CEO and extending as far down the organization chart as organizational leaders wish to go. But, as Exhibit 2 illustrates, the goal is not to identify individuals as immediate replacements for each position but rather to plan for a talent pool by level. Managers may, for instance, nominate individuals to be considered for the next level. They are then placed in a pool and are systematically developed for greater responsibility. But they are being prepared for any position at the next level above them--not specific positions. Typical goals of a talent pool are to have as many people as possible in the pool and to reach an 80 percent level of readiness for advancement to the next level. Once individuals are promoted, they are given the final 20 percent while in their new positions.
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Managers have to work together to identify candidates for inclusion in the talent pool. If there is a risk of losing a high percentage of individuals in the targeted higher-level group, then the development of HiPos (High Potentials) in the talent pool is accelerated. In that case, the talent pool is called an acceleration pool to indicate an effort to increase the speed of preparing individuals in the pool for promotion.

What Is Technical Succession Planning, and What Tool Can Make It Easier?
When experienced people retire or otherwise leave an organization to resignation, death or disability, they take with them special knowledge. That knowledge takes two forms. One form is institutional memory, which is knowledge of how the organization made decisions in the past and what lessons were learned from those experiences. The other form is tacit knowledge of what works in their individual jobs. Preparing to transfer knowledge from one experienced manager or worker to another is called knowledge transfer. Technical succession planning is the process of planning for, and carrying out, knowledge transfer (DeLong, 2004; Rothwell and Poduch, 2004).

Managers are not the only ones with technical knowledge. Indeed, technical knowledge is often most important with groups that rely on special technical knowledge to do their work—such as engineers, IT professionals, accounting professionals, research scientists, and others. Technical succession planning is growing more important in a global knowledge economy.

While there are many ways to transfer knowledge from more to less-experienced workers (see Rothwell, 2004), a simple tool can facilitate a quick way to consider the special knowledge, based on experience, that managers possess that should be transferred to possible replacements. Use the tool shown in Exhibit 3 to begin this process. While it does not help to capture all the most important technical knowledge, it does facilitate early efforts to lead managers to think about the issue and the need to plan for transfer. Try it out. Then involve managers in developing an approach to capture and transfer the know-how of in-house experts, sometimes called HiPros (High Professionals) to distinguish them from HiPos (High Potentials).
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What Is Social Relationship Succession Planning, and What Tool Can Make It Easier?
Technical knowledge is not the only important knowledge that should be the focus of knowledge transfer efforts. Another key issue to consider is how to transfer professional contacts and relationships (see Rothwell, 2007). That is called social relationship succession planning. It is important to any group—such as marketing, sales, public relations, or government lobbying—in which the knowledge of who to call to get results is key to getting those results. In some fields, building a social network can be the endeavor of a whole career. When the person who has done built that social network retires or otherwise leaves the organization, that social network is lost. That can sometimes translate into lost sales, diminished influence, and other problems for an organization.

Simply introducing a replacement to other people will not “transfer” the social contacts. Instead, the person who is about to leave the organization must set up one or more projects between the target of the social network and the successor to build trust and confidence. The person making the transfer then monitors the relationship to ensure that trust is built. Only then can a true transfer take place.

Use the Worksheet in Exhibit 4 to facilitate discussions about the key social networks enjoyed by various leaders and who must acquire those contacts—or else bring special contacts of their own to a replacement decision. While this approach is not perfect, it does begin to focus attention on the issue and provides a simple tool to think about it.
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Stepping up to the challenge of succession planning can be daunting. Some practitioners find it difficult to find simple but effective ways to facilitate management dialogues about replacement planning, management succession planning, technical succession planning, and social relationship succession planning. While it is true that robust approaches will yield robust results—you do get what you pay for and you do get out of a system the effort you put into it—sometimes practitioners are looking for simple tools to get the process moving. This article provided four simple, practical tools to facilitate such planning.

References
DeLong, D. (2004). Lost knowledge: Confronting the threat of an aging workforce. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rothwell, W. (2007). Social relationship succession planning: A neglected but important issue?. Asian Quality, 2(4), 34-36.

Rothwell, W. (2004). Knowledge transfer: 12 strategies for succession management. IPMA-HR News, pp. 10-12.

Rothwell, W., and Poduch, S. (2004). Introducing technical (not managerial) succession planning. Public Personnel Management, 33(4), 405-420.


William J. Rothwell, Ph.D., SPHR is President of Rothwell & Associates, Inc., a full-service consulting company that specializes in a robust range of succession planning practices. He is also Professor of workforce education and development on the University Park campus of The Pennsylvania State University. With over 20 years of full-time business and government experience before he arrived at Penn State, he has consulted with over 40 multinational corporations. Author of over 300 books, book chapters and articles, he is perhaps best known for the Strategic Development of Talent (HRD Press, 2004), Effective Succession Planning, 3rd ed. (AMACOM, 2005), Career Planning and Succession Management (Greenwood Press, 2005), Human Resource Transformation (Davies-Black, 2008) and Working Longer: Recruiting, Developing and Retaining Older Workers (Amacom, 2008).