When a member of the management leaves an organisation, it can create a vacuum. In today’s competitive market, mid-size companies can’t afford to leave leadership gaps to chance.
The solution: establishing a talent pipeline with the help of succession planning.
Promoting workers to leadership roles is not only an incentive but also a motivating factor. HR professionals and business owners want actionable insights into the best tools to identify and prepare future leaders within their organisation. In a mid to large-scale organisation, maintaining this data can be a challenge.
However, this can be easily addressed with the help of succession planning using suitable tools.
What is Succession Planning?
An HR strategy, succession planning is a process that helps identify and train suitable candidates from within the organisation for a leadership position. By opting for succession planning, businesses ensure that there is a talent pipeline in place for any management or leadership positions that fall vacant.
This ensures a smooth handover of roles and responsibilities and an easy transition into a leadership role. Further, with succession planning, the employee placed in a new role takes less time to adapt and become productive.
Additionally, it also serves as a motivator, helping improve morale by selecting employees for leadership training.
Why Succession Planning Is Crucial for Mid-size Businesses
Oftentimes, there is a common misnomer that having a talent pipeline for succession is a matter only for larger companies. While it is true that larger businesses invest greatly in training their employees for leadership positions, mid-sized businesses have a lot to gain from succession planning:
- Prevent disruption in leadership transitions
- Retain institutional knowledge
- Empower internal talent mobility and employee loyalty
- Avoid costly executive recruitment delays
Studies claim that it can take a new worker around 1 to 2 years to become fully productive. While this does vary with the complexity of the role, it simply translates into more time being taken by an employee to adjust to a leadership position.
A 2022 study by Forbes states an employee turnover of 4.35 million, including 1337 CEOs. This stresses how important it is to maintain a succession pipeline in an organisation.
What to Look for in a Succession Planning Tool
For an effective, accurate, and data-driven process, the succession planning tool should offer the following:
- Integration with existing HRIS/HRMS platforms
- Performance & potential tracking
- Scenario planning & role pipeline visualization
- Competency assessments
- Skill gap analysis
- Reporting dashboards
- Compliance features
Let’s get a better understanding of these features with the help of a table:
| Feature | Importance | Purpose | Necessity |
| HRIS/HRMS Integration | Streamlining the HR process to improve operational efficiency | Connecting different HR systems | Regulatory compliance and streamlining processes |
| Performance tracking | Maintaining transparency and accountability, and gaining insights on employees | Identifying the best workers | Facilitates informed decision-making |
| Scenario Planning | Helps navigate possible business challenges | Exploring possible challenges that an employee may face in a role | Checking a worker’s suitability for a role |
| Competency assessments | Weighing skill vis-à-vis performance to identify the best workers | Evaluating an employee’s skills, knowledge, and abilities | Helps evaluate the workers |
| Skill gap analysis | Identifies gaps between skill requirements and training for employees vis-à-vis their role | Workforce planning and targeted training programs | Better L&D programs and strategic planning |
| Reporting dashboards | Offers a centralised visual of all key metrics for each employee | Reflecting real-time results for each employee | Easy viewing of analytical data |
| Compliance features | Optimising processes, ensuring security, and keeping businesses audit-ready | Reducing risks and meeting industry requirements | Necessary in medium to large-scale organisations |
Table 1: Features of a Succession Planning Tool
Top 5 Succession Planning Tools for Mid-size Organisations
The top 5 succession planning tools include:
Success Circles™
A comprehensive succession planning and performance assessment tool, Success Circles™, evaluates employees based on feedback received, targets assigned, and achievements. Then, it generates analytics based on
- Leadership
- Development
- Culture and brand
- Communication
- Performance
This gets more detailed over time and provides information regarding an employee’s suitability for a particular role.
9-Box Grid
A classic HR tool, the 9-box grid for succession planning, sorts employees based on their performance and feedback into groups, ranging from top performers with potential to poor performers. Thus, it helps chalk out career paths for employees based on their potential and performance.
360-Degree Feedback
Instead of just accounting for inputs from the managers, this system also accounts for peer feedback, supervisor reports, and client feedback. Further, some organisations also ask the staff to complete self-assessments. Thus, the managers and HRM have a clear idea regarding each employee, regarding their performance, and how well they work in a team.
Employee Assessments
This system accounts for the personality of an employee, their behavioural traits, technical know-how, and cognitive assessments. Thus, HRMs get to learn whether an employee is a good fit for the role, having the knowledge, skills, and traits to perform well.
Succession Planning Template
A technique adopted by many organisations, it lists the criteria that the organisation prioritises when it comes to people in leadership roles. By weighing these against the performance KPIs of the employees, HRMs identify which employees are the best fit for a leadership role.
Comparison of the Top Succession Planning Tools
While many succession planning tools are available in the market, how to choose one is always a concern. Further, it also needs to be determined whether or not the chosen tool meets your business needs.
Here’s a comparative table of how the different succession planning tools measure up against each other:
| Tool | Best For | Standard Feature | Pros | Cons |
| Success Circles™ | All sizes of organisations | Accounts for multiple parameters like leadership skills, self-development, and adherence to culture, communication, and performance. | Data-driven, analytical, easy integration with HRIS/HRMS platforms, and compliance management. | Available as a licensed tool |
| 9-Box Grid Succession Planning | Mid-sized organisations | Sorts employees based on their potential. | Lays the groundwork for appraisals, employee feedback, and succession planning. | Subjective and lacks clarity |
| 360-Degree Feedback | All sizes of organisations | Contains inputs from supervisors, peers, clients, and managers. | Assess how the employee interacts, responds, and performs. | Can be subjective (based on parameters) |
| Employee Assessments | All sizes of organisations | Includes personality, technical, cognitive, and behavioral assessment | Offers a thorough assessment for every employee. | Can be subjective (based on parameters) |
| Succession Planning Template | Small organisations | Lays out the criteria that the organisation values for a completely customised approach. | Easy to edit and customise. | Lack of scalability |
Table 2: Comparing succession planning tools.
How to Choose the Right Succession Planning Tool
To learn which succession planning software is the best fit for your business, take the following steps:
- Set your goals and budget.
- Evaluate the available succession planning tools.
- Check for scalability and functionality.
- Look through user feedback.
- Opt for free trials.
- Check the client support provided by the vendor.
- Implement and train your employees.
Wrapping Up: Driving Accuracy in Succession Planning
Irrespective of the size of an organisation, having trained employees in place to fill gaps in management is a necessity, more so in mid-sized organisations. This makes it important to identify the right employees who are suitable for leadership roles, necessitating the use of succession planning tools.
Need to create a succession pipeline? Implement succession planning today!
