Speaker 1: So what is actually succession planning? Succession planning is a fantastic planning tool when it comes to critical roles, critical people, critical skills, in order to make sure our businesses are ready for the future and that we have a good plan as to how to tackle some of the difficulties we may encounter as and when our people leave. It is often overlooked in many organizations, often a reactive process, when in fact it should be something that we do on a regular basis at least two times a year alongside our talent management initiatives, talent planning and talent spotting processes. Succession planning is a process whereby organizations plan for the future business development and associated workforce growth, plan to manage the career path of their most talented individuals, plan to mitigate the risk of losing key individuals in critical roles, plan to address recruitment, retention pressures in critical business functions and discuss and prioritize talent risks and skills that have an impact on the delivery of business strategies. You can find a lot more information and detail in my own succession planning toolkit that I created for us and you can download it from our digital store. By the end of any succession planning process we should be able to identify the following specific business or departmental areas where recruitment or retention is particularly difficult, new business areas where we have limited corporate capability, business or departmental areas where current capability is deemed to be poor, within each business area or department the known risks, the action plan to mitigate the risk and plan review schedule, talent and development pools and plans and finally assessment summaries by employees to form the basis of an effective personal development plan. In terms of succession planning process and who needs to be included, in my own experience it may look like this. For us who are HR business partners we definitely need to start from working with heads of department or function directors or sometimes executive leads. It's important that in our conversations with them we establish a list of critical roles and critical people where succession planning will add value. Not all roles will require to have a succession plan in place. It's also important to differentiate between critical roles and critical people. Sometimes we will have a list of critical roles and by default certain people in these critical roles will also become critical people. However, in my own experience it is also possible to have a number of critical people in non-critical roles and this tends to happen quite often in large organizations where over time they acquire certain knowledge and experience that becomes quite unique that not many people would have in that particular team or department or across the organization. In my own experience it's important to start with critical roles and people who are in these critical roles before you start discussing critical people in non-critical roles. The following step is to start creating succession plan and in my toolkit you can find a copy of a succession planning template. Once you've populated your succession plan template and you've gone through critical roles and you've talked about potential successes, the next step is to define a clear action plan which would have to be put in place in order for you to feel satisfied you have a good plan should any of these people in critical roles move on. And final step is to review it every six months. A typical succession plan template usually looks like this in my own experience. It is important to start with listing relevant positions that we deem as critical roles for the purposes of this exercise. In each critical role or critical position there would be a relevant post holder. The following section focuses on risk of loss. Is it low, is it medium or is it high that this individual, that this person, this post holder would move on and leave our organization or our team at some point. The following question is about difficulty of replacement. Is it easy to replace them or not? So a simple yes or no answer is going to be relevant for this section. Then we need to populate and comment on job families section. Not all organizations have job families so if your organizations do not have defined job families for relevant roles you could for example use grades instead. And the following three sections are very important for the purposes of this exercise. So ready now section really focuses on people who are ready now to replace this individual. If let's say they resign, who are the people that could step up and simply fill this position quite successfully. So we would list relevant names in this section. The next section focuses on development candidates. So these are people who have got a potential to work in this role and they're usually already identified in your talent pools, in your talent management, talent spotting processes. So development candidates are people who are ready or will be ready to operate quite successfully in this position in one to three years. And the third section really focuses on emergency candidates. So let's say this post holder who is in a critical role goes off sick and they're not present anymore for whatever reason. Who are the emergency candidates we could actually reach out to that could step up and undertake the role now? The following section focuses on key skills and experience required for this role. I would absolutely encourage you to list essential skill set not desirable skill set. Often this list can be quite long. So my suggestion to you is just to focus on key essential skill set required for this role. The following section focuses on key roles where successors could come from in that particular department or across the organization. I personally think that succession planning process is a fantastic tool to actually have a good quality conversations about critical people and critical roles. It's a tool that gives you that confidence in narrative and exercises you need to have when you're actually having these conversations with your leadership teams. I find that many leaders actually love to talk about this but they don't have a lot of time or they don't know how to do it. So by you defining an approach or a template or a toolkit and always double check what your existing or current organizations actually do in this space. If you find yourself as a standalone HR, professional HR, business partner or a consultant you're trying to come up with something, my toolkit will definitely help you with that. I often have quite a number of templates and toolkits with me because I do find they act as a support mechanism to me when I feel a little bit exposed and not as confident on a particular topic. In my own experience, succession planning tends to be done alongside talent management processes or framework. So in a talent management process or well-established process if you like, there would be something called a nine grid box and in that nine grid box your potential talent, superstars, future leaders would be mapped against and that's definitely a separate video. But I do have a talent management framework toolkit as well that you can download and explore further. So in my experience both tend to be done together at the same time and you can do it as often as you need to have it. I find every six months is more than enough but if you are noticing there is quite a lot of churn, as in quite a lot of attrition in a particular department or a particular organization, you may wish to do this more frequently. Bottom line is that your departments, our organizations really can't move forward and can't deliver on their business strategies if they don't have these key positions filled. That's it for this video. If you have liked this video you can watch many other similar videos on my channel. So I'll see you shortly. Bye for now.