Succession Planning for Leaders Training

Day 1 

Session 1: What Is SP?    – Defining It 

• Understanding the Strategic Nature of SP-The fact that it needs to be part of the Business Plan but it often Isn’t which may lead to less effective outcomes. 

– Example Business Plan hand out to be used for as a short, Group Exercise to identify their business’s SP requirements.

– Getting Delegates to Share what they think their company’s SP requirements and needs are. 

• Brief History of SP and how the emphasis has changed from a purely ‘planning’ activity to a development activity

–Exercise/Discussion on why it needed to change 

• Understanding the key elements: identifying high potential people (‘bench strength’), forming talent pools, identifying key current and future positions to be filled, assessment techniques, recruitment policies, coaching and mentoring etc.

– Exercise/discussion – getting delegates to share which elements they   have in place and which elements they still need to introduce 

• Introducing the idea that there is no single formula for success – each company’s SP design is unique; based on the culture and political environment.

– Exercise in Syndicate Groups to define SP and present back to the   whole group to arrive at an agreed, working definition. 

Session 2: Why Is SP So Critically Important To Today’s Successful Businesses?

• Introducing the idea that there is today a ‘Fierce ‘War For Talent’ on a global scale.

– Group Discussion about why it is so challenging to recruit the right, top talent today

– High recruitment costs eg: agency fees

– Companies still often ‘outsource’ their SP to recruitment agencies at considerable cost with poor results sometimes.

-Top talent often chooses the ‘highest bidder’

• What does research on SP tell us?

– It suggests that 70% of US and European businesses recognize that    SP will be one of its single biggest challenges over the next 10 years

– But it also suggests that leaders developed from within tend to be on average, between two and six times more successful than external    recruits

• Why Have So Many Businesses Not Invested in SP yet?

– Short Syndicate Group Discussion Exercise

–  Answer – Is that many businesses don’t realize that they have many of the necessary SP elements in place. Their challenge is to integrate them into a single, dynamic operational system

– The good news is that to set up a comprehensive and effective system usually does not require a major investment

• What Are The Benefits?

– Increased engagement and motivation

– Improved Retention

– BUT the biggest is that by creating and developing a high potential talent pool, companies can respond to new, emerging growth opportunities eg: an acquisition, with agility and flexibility.

Session 3: How To Design And Implement SP?

Stage 1 – Clarifying your business strategy and aligning your SP to create the talent to achieve it 

– Using a real business strategy, case study for delegates to analyze and then suggest what its SP requirements are – creating an overall list of agreed requirements

– Starting with the ‘big picture’ and gradually, throughout the rest of the course, ’drilling into the detail’

Stage 2 – Engaging with your senior leadership team (SLT) 

– Clarity about the three objectives of doing this:

1. The SLT should be responsible for identifying high potential, future leaders – the emerging talent pool.
2. It should also be responsible for the structure of he organization and identifying the key roles and positions within it that it should eventually fill with candidates from the new, talent pool.
3. The SLT should not only maintain oversight for the corporate SP project but also be fully committed to its own, ‘hands on” involvement: providing mentoring and possibly coaching to members of the talent pool throughout the programme. Understanding that without the SLT commitment the SP programme will fail

– Using the Nine Box Grid (NBG) 

One of the best methods to facilitate the SLT Discussion and decision making to make the initial selection of candidates for the new talent pool.

– Pair Group Exercise – delegates will learn to use the NBG by working through each Box and inserting the names of actual people from their company according to their personal judgement of their leadership potential. 

SESSION 4: HOW TO DESIGN AND IMPLEMENT SP

Stage 3 – Defining the critical competencies required to undertaking the key roles successfully.

– Understanding the need for a robust, objective and consistent set of performance criteria or competencies to make relatively accurate and sound judgments about potential candidates for the SP programme.

– Syndicate group exercise using a real, case study competency framework for delegates to understand the basics of developing a leadership competency framework – interviews, focus groups, the critical incident technique etc. 

– Delegates will create a small example of a competency framework for their company.

Stage 4 – Candidate Assessment Using Competency Based Criteria

– Learning that after an initial candidate assessment via the NBG, there is a need to assess candidates objectively. Best practice suggests that the use of multiple assessment techniques is most effective. These will include:

1. A case study example hand-out of a real, competency based, 360 degrees review process that can be used to provide stand alone, individual feedback or feedback in a Development Centre
2. The use of psychometric tools like personality, ability and motivational tests – real examples will be presented
3. The essential use of Development Centres – all candidates assessed together as group using trained assessors to evaluate individual performances on a series of competency based, exercises.

– Candidates need to ’pass’ in order to become a member of the talent pool

Day 2 

Session 5: How to Implement SP? 

Stage 5 – Building and Developing the Talent Pool 

• The shift from succession planning to succession management over the last 10 years.

–  Discussion about why the development of the talent pool is now seen as more critical than the previous planning stages.

– What are the most important development activities?

• Creating individual personal development plans (PDP’s) that act as a route map, guide and provide clear objectives for each candidate’s learning process as members of the talent pool.

–  Exercise,- delegates will create a brief version of their own development needs in a PDP 

• The use of secondments and temporary projects within the business that will provide candidates with new and powerful learning experiences about how the company works as well as developing their own skills and knowledge.

– Delegates will do an exercise to identify current, suitable, potential secondments and temporary projects within their own   business. 

• The limited use of either internal or externally provided training courses to address particular skills development.
• Understanding that the most important development activity of all is coaching and mentoring because they are always focused exclusively on the individual’s objectively identified development needs

• Understanding the difference between coaching and mentoring?

– Identifying who provides it – much of it by the SLT?

• How to make it cost effective?

Session 6: A Succession Planning Case Study 

• A real case study exercise that the facilitator helped to direct

– Syndicate group exercise to identify the potential strengths and weaknesses of the project 

Session 7: Creating Your Own Succession Plan 

• As the final piece of ‘action learning’, it is important for delegates to apply what they have learnt by creating a ‘first draft’, SP action plan to present back to the business after the course

–  A more effective outcome than simply having a few insights and ideas about SP – they need to start putting them into     practice back at work.

– Pair group working, helping each to work methodically through all of the stages presented and begin making decisions about   what direction their company’s SP project should take.

– For companies with SP already in place, they will need to highlight areas for improvement in their action plan.

Session 8: Presentation of SP Action Plans 

• Individual presentations back to the group to validate and receive feedback on their plans and the thinking behind them.
• Feedback should be considered by each delegate and if necessary used to change or modify their plan

Session 9: Group Review and Reflections 

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