If you don’t want your co-workers, peers or executives to roll their eyes and scoff at your ancient processes, get rid of these 7 succession planning policies NOW!

 

Awful Succession Planning Policy 1: Only Allowing Planners to Select Successors from the chain of command under a position

 

Successors should be the best candidates for the role regardless of the current department or position they hold in a company.

 

Awful Succession Planning Policy 2: Heralding super-flat organizations as a nirvana of efficiency.

 

Communication, goal setting, career paths and many other issues are often crippled by the huge gap between levels in a flat organization.

 

Awful Succession Planning Policy 3: Allowing performance review scores to be weighted as high as 80% of criteria for placement as successor

 

Unless your performance management rates and process are perfect AND geared specifically for succession planning, you are setting yourself up for complete failure.

 

Awful Succession Planning Policy 4: Only doing succession planning for the top three layers of an organization.

 

There are key positions throughout organizations that need succession plans or replacement plans far more than many in the upper ranks of the organization.

 

Awful Succession Planning Policy 5 Producing future workforce strategies without reviewing the data of historic workforce trends and external market conditions.

 

History will repeat itself. It’s a famous adage and it applies to the lessons you need to learn in your own employee base as well. What can history prepare you for now?

 

Awful Succession Planning Policy 6 Avoiding line managers and business unit leaders when it comes to making employee policies, because they “don’t understand HR”

 

Help them understand their workforce and make sure you distribute the input gathering to include the management in the fields from succession planning, to compensation decisions, to team structures and many other topics. If they don’t understand the impact of their decisions on the big picture of the workforce, then shame on you, not them. It is your job to engage them with tools and conversations.

 

Awful Succession Planning Policyv 7 Accepting that hard to use succession planning software is better because it is more complex and will do more for you.

 

Or, cheaper succession planning software is merely simpler or give you a faster, yet lesser return. You need to select succession planning software that fits your organization’s needs and the way your people think and process their requirements.