It’s a fact of life that no matter how great your workplace is, at some stage you will lose key staff. This might be due to career changes, personal situations, babies, marriages, or they simply make the big move out of Auckland to escape the rising house prices.
Whatever the reason, losing a successful leader can have a huge impact on your team, as well as your future business objectives. Projects can be delayed, team dynamics interrupted, and it takes time and cost to ride this out and get your business back on track.
Having a succession and talent management plan in place is a vital ingredient of successfully safeguarding your business against this disruption. Equally as important is ensuring the identified successors have the skills and ability to step up into the role before the transition takes place.
A key component of this is ensuring that successors have the leadership skills to manage this transition to leaders, develop relationships quickly, and move their teams forward from day one. Too often we see team members moved into leadership roles without the required leadership experience to be successful, promoted with the hope that they develop these skills once they have been appointed. The damage this can do to a team and to their own self confidence while they learn can be long lasting.
To develop a succession and talent plan that really works to support your business it is important that you:
- Identify a pool of talent, large or small, within your business that has the potential to move into leadership roles
- Identify the key skills required for each identified team member to step up to a new role
- Identify the skills gaps for identified team members well in advance of these skills being needed
- Develop these skills by training, coaching and project work, before they need to use them
A skilled leader will fill any role gap seamlessly, ease the team into the transition, and communicate openly and honestly from day one on their expectations and your business goals. When this is done well the loss of a key team member is barely felt and your business can continue successfully on its current trajectory.
Succession and talent planning matters. This has, in no small measure, been one of the key ingredients to the All Blacks continued success and competitive advantage over many years. What would you give to be the All Blacks of your sector?
Positive People have 22 years’ experience working with businesses to develop their future leaders.
For more information view Leadership Development