What is Succession Planning?

 Hi, so today’s top tip is the Queen of Clubs and it’s all about succession planning. Now I touched on this really briefly in the Jack of Clubs, but today is a little bit more detail for you. 

Succession planning: this can be as simple or as complicated as the business wants to make it. Succession planning is a process of looking at each position in the business and deciding who from the existing staff could fill that role in one, three or five years time. Identifying the skills existing staff would need to ensure that their appraisals and training needs analysis, take this into consideration. If there’s a position within the company without an internal successor, this needs a contingency plan. And to be taken into consideration when recruiting. 

Now this works better in a slightly larger business or a very large business. It’s quite hard to succession plan in businesses with less than five employees. But certainly once you get beyond that, look at where people can go, hire for their long-term potential. We talked about promotions yesterday, making sure that people understand what you are preparing them for in the future in terms of a succession plan and the steps that you’re going to take them through to get there can be really, really powerful. And having a good succession plan in place, that protects your business. 

That’s good business sense.