Learning/talent development and succession planning are two of the most critically important human resource management processes within any organization.
An organization can have great structures in place for measuring performance/rewards and work tirelessly to recruit and hire the right set of candidates. However, if it can't work effectively on assessing and developing key talent and have clear objectives for learning & development, every other effort might go to waste and not pay off in the long run.
To help you navigate this hurdle effectively, this blog aims to explore the connection between the two processes - succession planning and learning and development - and understand the key learning and development objectives that organizations should focus on for their talent development function. Before moving further, take a quick look at the top 10 talent development tools and find the right one.
What is Succession Planning?
Succession planning refers to a strategy that focuses on identifying potential employees, leaders, and high performers, thus giving them the opportunity to develop so they can advance within their organization. Irrespective of the size and industry, the concept is relevant to all organizations.
The key aim of the succession planning process is to create a robust talent pipeline of successors that will help keep the organization running with minimal interruptions when staff changes take place.
Succession planning ensures the smooth continuity of business processes after an important role or position in the company becomes vacant. A well-crafted succession plan helps an organization identify skill gaps and highlights the need for training/investing in employee learning along with retaining internal company knowledge. The process also helps identify leaders and employees with the right skill sets and talent from the internal talent pool to fill the vacant position appropriately.
Advantages of Succession Planning
The need for succession planning in any organization relates closely to the advantages it brings to the table. Some of these include:
- The process helps save the time and cost required in terms of finding workforce replacement and lost productivity
- Succession planning helps a company ensure that there are more employees available with the required skill set to replace senior executives and create a better reputation of the business in the marketplace as a talent destination
- The process ensures smoother business operations and uninterrupted excellence because skilled employees can immediately fill required high-level roles
- Succession planning boosts employee engagement through career development and makes employees in the organization feel more valued
Where Does Training and Development Fit in Here?
The training and development function in any organization is much more than a simple benefit to the employees. It is key for an organization's short as well as long-term health.
With its main focus on equipping and improving employees with specific skillsets, these learning programs have various additional far-reaching benefits, such as helping improve employee satisfaction, enhancing employee retention, and employee engagement.
Further, training and development also help HR teams fill talent gaps in the organization through the internal development of talent, making it crucial for the short and long-term health of an organization and leading to increased productivity.
By systematically working to help the entire workforce improve through training, the level of talent that an organization can draw from also grows. A learning or training and development program should be treated as an investment that will offer great benefits in the future through enhanced productivity and the development of employee skills, engagement as well as retention.
This talent-building initiative creates a robust pool of potential employees that are fully trained and equipped to fill crucial positions in the company, thus creating higher stability and continuity. This also means that the training and development plans, while customized to the employee, must also keep the organization's needs in mind and should be well-coordinated with an organization's succession plan.
Benefits of Coupling Learning With Succession Planning
When integrated with a training and development program, succession planning can significantly impact the bottom line of the business. Combining the two means that when there is a churn, instead of HR teams looking around for a good fit for a key position, they already have trained someone with the relevant skillset that they are looking for.
It leads to multiple benefits such as:
- Saving time, money, and resources since internal promotions tend to cost much less as compared to outside hires
- Cutting down on expenses such as posting job posts and onboarding new hires
- The process develops a sense of stability, especially in times of potential crisis at the unexpected loss of a senior management position
- It is an excellent way to retain top talent as employees who trust their own organizations' ability to invest in employees and exhibit how much room for development there is are much less likely to look outside for their personal career development.
Combining the organization's training and development program with succession planning allows an organization to prepare and equip high-potential employees to successfully take on their future roles in the company, thus creating a sense of stability and security.
Additionally, centralizing training and development and succession planning is also a great idea, as hiring employees externally for key positions costs much more. Those candidates also tend to be less successful as compared to their internally trained counterparts.
How to Successfully Combine and Manage Succession Planning and Training and Development?
Here are some of the key steps that you can take to successfully combine and manage the succession planning and training and development functions in your organization:
a. Identify Potential Employees -While it seems a great idea to offer training and development programs to all employees, it makes sense to allocate your resources wisely. This translates to identifying high-potential employees and allocating resources to those who show the greatest potential to hold key positions in the future.
b. Recognize the Gaps – When combining a succession plan with a training and development program, the need is to identify all the potential gaps in the organizational structure along with the gaps in the employee's skill set. The best way to do this is to create a profile for each of the important positions in the company.
This profile (which includes experience, skills, personality, and behaviour) can then be used to identify high-potential employees and the areas they need to improve to fill the position they have been identified for in the succession plan. The profile serves as a goal and checklist on which you can focus your employee training and development program.
c. Equip the Selected Employees – Post the identification of the organization and employee skills gaps, you can effectively create customized training and development plans to equip your employees properly. This should include both real-world experience along hands-on experience. Integrating both allows future executives to be appropriately prepared and enables them to make more informed decisions while honing their newly acquired skills.
d. Re-evaluate Programs/Plans as Required – Both succession plans and training and development programs are quite dynamic in nature, making it essential to adapt to ongoing changes concerning employee churn and learning. Likewise, sometimes employees may not live up to the expectations that managers envisioned. In such cases, adjustments should be made accordingly; HR teams should keep a close eye on both these areas through regular re-evaluations.
e. Develop a Culture – One of the keys to the success of both these plans is developing a culture that prioritizes both succession planning and training and development. This essentially means creating a culture that focuses on the success and long-term health of the organization.
Overall, succession planning and training and development are two of the most essential areas to focus on for any HR department concerned with their organization's current and future success. Also learn Why Prioritizing Learning and Development in HR is Key to Employee and Organizational Success, visit here.
Role of L&D in Succession Planning
When it comes to the challenges in having a robust succession planning framework, some of the most common ones include insecurity of leaders in developing successors, issues with business deliverables, ill-defined roles, and the substantial amount of time that the process takes.
L&D professionals play a key role in honing this process. Here is how they can intervene to make these plans successful for both employees and organizations:
- By ensuring that succession planning concentrates on creating an effective successor. Although the styles of each leader can vary, the vision and core values should remain the same.
- By mapping every role in the organization and building a successor with a defined roadmap to help organizations. This, followed by a regular review process, would also encourage more focused hiring.
- By designing a proper framework that is relevant and aligned with organizational growth along with mapping competencies of the roles for succession
- Understanding the current level of skill/competencies. Supporting the employees through well-defined L&D objectives and consistent training and coaching.
- Following a training and evaluation process along with creating a learning environment to support continuous knowledge sharing.
- By taking ownership and contributing to the upskilling of the successors even outside of classroom training.
Now that we have more clarity on how training and development and succession planning work together let us understand the importance of having clear training objectives for employee learning.
Importance of Training Objectives for L&D
Training objectives are primarily the measurable and predetermined outcomes that your workforce is expected to achieve after completing a learning and development training program. These objectives should be designed in a way that clearly communicates the tangible benefits of the overall training program in a manner that engages and resonates with employees effectively.
A well-defined training objective for learning and development mainly consists of three key components - performance, condition, and criteria. Creating clear training objectives can be incredibly useful for organizations/learners and have below factors in common:
- Outcome-oriented goals
- Clear and realistic timelines
- Relevant course material and training
- Consistent reviews and assessments to ensure long-term success
When defining training objectives, it is also important to keep in mind that they should highlight the specific and measurable goals you want to see from your workforce or employee learning and development efforts.
Common Training Objectives for Employees
The first and foremost step before you work to set your training objectives is to consider your organization's overall goals and identify existing gaps that currently exist in your workforce. Ideally, the training objectives should centre around filling up or closing those knowledge gaps so you can fulfil key initiatives.
Although every organization may have unique goals, some of the employee training objectives are universal, including:
a. Upskilling the workforce- Closing the existing knowledge gaps and ensuring that your employees have the required skillsets will help future-proof your organization. Upskilling also helps your employees adapt to change and improve their individual performance.
b. Employee retention-The fact that modern workers greatly value training and development opportunities makes investing in your employees to help increase their retention rates an excellent training objective.
c. Better offerings- Skilled and qualified employees make a key difference in defining the quality of your company's offerings. Training and development of the workforce help fuel innovation and new, creative ideas, which ultimately help improve the services and products of your business.
To Conclude
Succession planning is a critical factor for any organization's growth as it helps in clearly identifying and creating future leaders. However, for HR teams, it is difficult to define the success parameters of the program, and hence there remains an ambiguity of sorts in adapting the framework by all stakeholders.
The need is for this framework to be aligned to the respective business/organizational goals to ensure robust participation in the program from all internal/external stakeholders.
To effectively navigate this, it is important to have a powerful L&D function in place along with formulating successful training objectives that clearly state your purpose, highlight various actionable goals, and ensure that those goals align with larger organizational initiatives.
The idea is to ensure that both the learning and development function and talent management teamwork in close collaboration to build a powerful framework that is both simple and well-aligned to suit the organizational structure.
