Summary
Succession Planning That Works is a comprehensive guide that HR professionals can use to effectively roll out a succession planning initiative that optimizes for long-term organizational effectiveness. The practically-step-by-step guide includes E2E best practices, from how to gain executive buy-in to implementation at each layer to measuring program success.
Below are the 21 succession activities explored in the book.
One of the more interesting features of Succession Planning That Works is that it also directly explores programming that has led to suboptimal outcomes (mainly from the reasons listed below).
Regardless of your org size or current succession programming in place, you will still almost certainly find tips that can measurably improve the status quo.
My Thoughts
This guide does a great job of differentiating between the likely succession needs of large vs. small organizations (i.e. you don’t have to be part of a large org to find this book super useful).
The author indicates that the ultimate goal for a succession plan is to have such a robust talent pool that almost all non-entry-level roles are hired internally (since the success rate of internal promotions is apparently much higher). Following that logic, an ideal org would mostly have employees who have been at the company for many years. People with only exposure to how that one company operates. Because this philosophy leads to a lower diversity of experiences among its talent pool, it comes with a risk of less innovation and more status quo bias (a.k.a. resistance to positive change). I believe the author’s philosophy makes sense for most use cases, but please keep in mind that it also carries these risks. The good news: there are simple ways to mitigate these potential drawbacks, including the following options:
incentivize employees to participate in professional conferences and other networking events, specifically with the goal of identifying new ideas/techniques for future internal company use (e.g. you can formally connect subsequent conference funding with how effectively the employee implemented new ideas inspired from their first conference)
sponsor internal hackathons
explicitly incorporate the implementation of innovations into performance management reviews
While I agree with almost all of the book's contents, it's important to point out that the author's support relies almost exclusively on anecdotal evidence. Why does this matter? Because it's common to observe people or companies that currently exist and prematurely attribute their survival to intelligent decision-making (when sometimes it's simply luck). The takeaway here is that, if you doubt any of the advice from this book, it's generally a good idea to search for additional evidence.
My Recommendation
If you are an executive or HR employee that is considering or engaged in succession planning, I strongly recommend reading this book (it’s a quick read).
