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Succession planning is crucial in ensuring sustainable growth and the long-term success of an organization. This process involves the timely identification and preparation of employees to fill key leadership roles, and as such, it’s closely related to strategic skills management.
By bringing skills management into succession planning, your organization can build a skilled and future-ready talent pool that supports smooth leadership transitions and keeps the institution moving forward.
In this article, we look at how HR professionals can use skills management to prepare the next generation of higher ed leaders.
Why Succession Planning Matters
Without a solid succession plan, an organization lacks the ability to respond to leadership gaps and increases the risk of making rushed hiring decisions that could disrupt operations and even harm the institution’s reputation.
In addition, succession planning helps ensure that a company isn’t left with a knowledge and skills vacuum when leaders exit. In other words, this proactive approach plays a crucial role in preserving all the value generated within the organization, irrespective of management or personnel changes.
The Role of Skills Management in Succession Planning
The building blocks of skills management (assessment, mapping, development, and tracking) help HR professionals identify potential leaders among the existing workforce. These building blocks are used to pinpoint employee strengths and to create development paths that will turn them into effective leaders.
Skills management is also useful in identifying and developing the soft and interpersonal skills that leaders must have, like adaptability, strategic thinking, active listening, and team building. By taking a 360-degree view to skills, this approach can reinforce succession planning efforts and deliver benefits that include:
- Reduced leadership gaps: In 2019, 77% of surveyed organizations reported leadership gaps. Addressing this issue is particularly critical and time-sensitive now that Baby Boomers in leadership roles are retiring. Skills management enables organizations to train a robust pool of potential leaders to ensure better continuity.
- Higher engagement and retention: When employees see clear paths for professional growth that include training and development for leadership roles, they’re more likely to stay with the institution in the long term.
- Stronger organizational resilience: Skills-based succession planning helps build a resilient organization that can handle the challenges linked to leadership transitions.
The Pillars of Integrating Skills Management into Succession Planning
Know Where You Are Through a Skills Audit
The first step in skills-based succession planning is conducting an extensive skills audit to determine your organization’s current resources and capabilities. This includes mapping key leadership competencies – such as problem-solving, communication skills, resilience, and strategic thinking – across the entire organization and not just at management level.
Create the Roadmap
Next, it’s time to create a roadmap to skills development for leadership roles. This skills map must be as granular as possible, highlighting gaps between current capabilities and future needs and specifying the specific skills needed to bridge those gaps.
Talent Planner tools are an excellent aid in this respect, as they help HR experts make sense of skills intelligence data and can point to practical workforce development scenarios. For business managers, these tools can assist in prioritizing investment in training and making a more cost-effective allocation of resources so they’re directed to developing high-potential employees.
Update Your Workforce Development Programs
The skills roadmap can then be used to update existing skills development programs, creating new paths for potential leaders. Since the map accounts for obsolete, current, and future skills, HR experts can use it to tailor development plans so that the leaders of the future grow in the areas that matter the most.
All development programs should be assessed periodically and adjusted as needed. Skills management tools and platforms can simplify this process, helping ensure that succession plans always respond to internal needs and external circumstances.
Tech Tools Help You Implement Skills Management in Succession Planning
Specialized skills management tools and platforms can assist HR professionals to streamline key processes, like skills auditing, talent development, and real-time skills tracking. Some advanced solutions incorporate artificial intelligence, which vastly improves data analysis in HR and helps inform the succession planning strategy.
By choosing the right technology, businesses can take their skills management efforts to new levels of accuracy and efficiency. In turn, this ensures that organizations always have a skilled pipeline of future-ready leaders, minimizing the risk of experiencing critical leadership gaps.
Conclusion
Bringing skills management into succession planning is one of the keys to an institution’s success and continuity. With the help of specialized tech tools, HR experts can prepare the workforce for smooth leadership transitions, design pathways for career growth, and create succession strategies that meet the organization’s current and future needs.
