Past attempts at succession strategies often lacked the flexibility to switch very different personalities into the same role. This is why, as Matt Henkes discovers, modern practitioners are shifting their approach to deal with the unexpected.

Past succession strategies used to be a list of promising individuals earmarked for a particular role, perhaps five years down the line. However, this kind of thinking is open to various problems of inflexibility, especially in today’s fast paced business world where situations are liable to change at the drop of a hat.

Modern succession planning focuses on assessing the talent resources available to an organisation and categorising this against different role types, taking a much greater range of factors into account. Psychological profiling, for example, is used frequently to build up an all-round picture of staff, looking at everything from their aspirations and motivations to hidden flaws.

Being less specific about slotting people into predetermined roles and understanding the cadre of skills and capabilities needed to fill certain types of position moves your planning horizon closer, further increasing the flexibility of your succession strategy. The added versatility will make it easier to adapt the strategy to shifting business aims and requirements.

Business psychologist Robert Myatt, director of Kaisen Consulting, believes that advanced psychometrics is the key to unlocking your workforce’s potential and helping people to fill the roles they were born for. This requires a global assessment of individual strengths, rather than simply measuring a person’s ability to do the job. Personality traits, unlike business skills and knowledge, are not likely to change as an individual develops.

“It is deep stuff because, essentially, what we’re trying to do is establish those patterns and themes that have been present with that individual, pretty much since the year dot, and are therefore likely to continue,” he says.

Potential not reputation

The key term is potential. Assessment centres can use all manner of tests to establish a person’s current business knowledge and ability, but during a typical assessment process, a subjective judgement of a person’s potential is based on two things. The first is performance which, although a good indicator of ability, is entirely retrospective. Who is to say that person will be able to operate at the same level in a different role?

The second, more dubious measure is often taken from reputation. Is this person held in esteem by colleagues and managers? Ensuring the right people think the right things about you proves only that you are a shrewd political operator. Your reputation may outweigh your true potential.

For instance, a person might be a high-flying salesman. Move them into a more senior role and the strengths that made them successful in sales might act as a hindrance when it comes to managing people. Sophisticated psychological assessments might flag this potential problem the moment that person is considered for the role.

Understanding where a person’s motivations originate is vital to marrying them with a role type that will push their buttons in the right way. “The thing about motivation is that it doesn’t really change much,” says Myatt. “It’s driven by our particular upbringing and the values that come from our parents.” And people’s skills often correlate with their motivations.

Managing the avalanche

Handling such detailed information is relatively simple when dealing with a small number of staff. It’s a different matter consistently getting the right people into the right places when succession planners are dealing with thousands of staff.

Robert Mellwig, vice president of HR at the US hotel firm Destination Hotels, oversaw the implementation of a system designed by talent management solutions firm SumTotal. It handles the records of around 7,500 staff, including over 1,200 managers. He says that as the company grew from 15 to 30 hotels, his team’s task of understanding the talent within the organisation became extremely complex.

The tipping point came when the firm acquired around 400 managers. At that time, he quips: “We were doing it using our fingers, toes and an abacus.”

The system has fundamentally changed the succession process within Destination. It sliced 40 per cent from the cost of time spent trying to fill management positions and increased its internal promotion ratio by 15 per cent. “The extended cost of implementation has already paid for itself by about six to one over three years,” he adds.

Mellwig is now able to perform sophisticated searches on a cross reference of different skills and competencies, quickly compiling lists of suitable candidates from across the organisation.

The system also produces ad hoc reports that flag potential gaps in the company’s succession pool, enabling the executive to channel resources for development into areas where it’s most needed. “We can have an individualised approach for a targeted number of people,” he explains. “In a broader system, without any detailed data, you’d be shooting into the wind.”

Empowering the people

Further automation of this process can be seen in systems developed by Step Stone Solutions, a European online talent management solutions firm. Its succession planning system allows employees to update their own information which, while taking a hefty administrative burden from the HR team, also empowers staff to become part of the succession process.

“What happens too often is that decisions are made on succession with management having only considered the company perspective,” says Grant Crowe, managing director at Step Stone. “Companies have what they think are really appealing roles and offer them out of the blue to an individual without much pre-planning or discussion, only to find that there is no real match with the individual’s own aspirations.”

He believes a common mistake is for firms to be too secretive about their succession planning. If a high potential candidate doesn’t get the job they thought they were going to get, the real issue is to manage the fall out. Crowe urges a transparent approach where the candidate knows who they were up against, what their likelihood of success was and what, if necessary, they needed to develop.

Avoid raising false hopes, give people clear targets and a knock back is far less likely to result in the loss of a candidate.