Why You Need a Succession Plan

An organization uses succession planning to ensure that it recruits superior employees, develops their knowledge, skills, and abilities, and prepares them for advancement. You need to develop a succession plan to ensure that your employees are constantly developed to fill each needed role as the organization evolves.

As your organization expands, loses key employees and provides promotional opportunities, your succession plan guarantees that you have employees on hand ready and waiting to fill new roles. Through your succession planning process, you will retain superior employees because they appreciate the time, attention, and development that you are investing in them. To effectively do succession planning in your organization, you must identify the organization’s long term goals. In addition, successful succession planning builds bench strength to protect your organization against the challenges associated with these 3 occurrences:

Organizational Growth & Reorganization
Organizational growth has the potential to provide a company with a variety of benefits, including greater efficiencies from economies of scale, increased marketplace visibility, a greater ability to withstand market fluctuations, greater profits, and increased prestige for employees. While it spurs job creation, organizational growth also has challenges. A company may outgrow the skills or abilities of its leaders and employees. All those involved may quickly become stressed out trying to keep up with the demands of expansion. Without proper succession planning, the expansion may become ineffective and stall.

Loss of a Key Employee
Every corporation has key leaders or employees that make substantial contributions to the operation, profitability, and success of the business. Any individual who has critical intellectual information, sales relationships, product knowledge, and/or industry contacts that may adversely affect profits in the event of their absence, may be considered key. A succession plan will ensure that an organization can tolerate the short term and permanent loss of a key employee.

Easily Replace a Poor Performer
A poorly performing employee can negatively affect team and organizational performance. Sometimes, they can undermine their coworkers' efforts through their incompetence or uncivil behavior. When attempts to correct their behavior or improve their performance fails, it may become necessary to terminate that employee. A robust succession plan will ensure that an organization will have cultivated other employees to fill the void caused by a staff termination. In addition, it will allow you to plan ahead to replace that employee with a new recruit in a timely fashion.

David Schuchman

Technology Training from a Manager's Perspective

Every manager who plays a role in researching, selecting or implementing enterprise technology needs to have a firm grasp on emerging technologies. In addition, managers serve the larger business purpose to ensure that technology is being used to the company's best strategic advantage. A program of continual information technology training is crucial to the success of any IT team.

Technology is constantly evolving, and it seems that there is a new product and service released almost daily that is meant to simplify doing business. This can be overwhelming if you do not stay current on the high-level trends of technology and their corresponding impact on business. As a manager, you must take it upon yourself to become proactive by keeping abreast of emerging trends. You need to understand them not only from a technical standpoint, but evaluating them from a higher-level, strategic standpoint. This type of knowledge will help you make conscious and informed decisions on what aspects of new technologies will affect your organization over the next few years.

IT employees have to continually engage in professional development to keep pace with new technologies and applications. They often become technology innovators within the organization, and can serve as internal advocates and trainers. Hence, the trained IT employees can bring the other employees up to speed as end-users of technology.

Employers who invest in employee professional development also tend to reap rewards when it comes to employee retention and job satisfaction. Organizations that encourage their employees to attend training are viewed as being caring and supportive. In such an environment, employees are more likely to stay for the long haul and to have positive attitudes toward their jobs and their companies.

David Schuchman