How to Assess Potential for Succession Planning and Development
By Michelle Malay Carter on November 12, 2007
Although?it’s becoming clear that?succession planning is important, a Harvard Business Review study finds 60% of US companies have no plan in place.?
Why is no one planning for succession??
Because managers have a conscience!? I suspect the whimsy, inconsistent, politically-laden assessing-potential processes most organizations resort to using leave managers feeling queasy and sleazy.? No wonder they avoid it.
Consider the following metaphor, you and I can fight all day about whether the room we are sitting in is hot or cold.??Who is right?? Succession planning can be a little like this.? One person’s smart employee can be another’s fool.? But you and I could walk together to the thermostat and agree that the room temperature is 70 degrees.? Just as we can agree to the problem solving capability level of a given employee.? Whether I think this person is smart or dumb becomes irrelevant.
If we can stratify jobs into levels of complexity and then compare people’s ability relative to?their ability to solve problems at that level, we no longer have to?use meaningless words (dumb, smart, clever, sharp)?to describe capability.? Instead we can say, this person is currently capable of level 3 work, and that means the same thing to all of us.?
Giving Managers a Common Language
The problem with nearly all succession planning is that it has no scientific theory base, and therefore, no universal measures or common language.? Using a work levels theory base, aka stratified systems theory aka requisite organization, makes assessing potential relatively straightforward because it provides universal measures and a common language.
When I work with clients to help their line managers assess potential, we are looking for level of cognitive capacity to solve problems, aka current potential capability.
Brace Yourself for a Little Theory?
Work can be divided into discreet levels of complexity (just as H2O can exist as ice, water, or steam).? Using a universal measurement system, time span of discretion, all jobs can be classified by level.? Each level of work calls for a specific level of cognitive capacity, aka complexity of information processing.
How to Assess Potential?Rapidly and Consistently
So when we assess potential, we are looking at the level at which a person can currently solve problems, or at what level of the organization are they currently suited to work.? Then, we look at the level of their current role.?
What to Do with the Results
If an employee’s cognitive capacity matches the role, no action is required.
If they have greater potential than the role, the manager-once-removed (who is accountable for talent development of his people two levels down) needs to look to get the person promoted.? This might require filling any current skill or experience gaps that would allow for this person to assume a role that matches their current cognitive capacity.
When a person has cognitive capacity below that required of their current role, that person should be redeployed into a lower level role.
Accurate Data?for?Succession and?Development Planning?
Cognitive capacity matures throughout our lifetimes in a predictable manner. ?If you know a person’s current capacity and age, you can predict their future potential as well.? So long term development planning is possible.?
Any thoughts?? Have I raised or lowered your blood pressure?
Filed Under Executive Leadership, High Potential, Managerial Leadership, Requisite Organization, Succession Planning, Talent Management
Comments
6 Responses to “How to Assess Potential for Succession Planning and Development”
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Michelle,
This has been an illuminating series on the succession planning issue, and I hope to benefit from more of it.
Your concept of using the “manager-once-removed” is an excellent approach. It is one I would particularly like to see taken at the very top, which would call for the board – not the CEO – to be responsible for succession planning at the level of that individual at least.
In my view, the board should be charged with ensuring and supervising the succession planning for all C-level executives at the very least, if not a broader range of senior management.
Thanks for a great – and undoubtedly for many, a provocative – post!
Jim,
Thank you for your comment. I’d love to take credit for the manager-once-removed idea, but it is yet another piece of the late Elliott Jaques’ total systems model, Requisite Organization.
He built a solid body of work for 50 years, but his ideas have been dismissed, denounced, and denied by the mainstream for just as long. I believe he was a little ahead of his time, albeit a little cantankerous too.
Only now with the catastrophic failure of current management paradigms are people beginning to become attracted to his ideas. They say when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.
My blog is designed to put a just-in-time, practical, humorous facade on his model as it isn’t as sexy and well marketed as other ideas out there, but but my experience bears that it is far more useful than anything I have come across in my career. The fact that it is optimistic about human nature is attractive to me also.
Let’s continue the dialog.
Regards,
Michelle
[…] tips: For some excellent commentary on succession planning and manager development, please see this piece by Michelle Malay Carter, author of Mission Minded Management, and this one by Wally Bock at Three […]
Once again leadership rears it’s beautiful head (ugly if you’re self-serving). Managers that only have management blood running through their veins will leave succession planning in the dust. Those who do care and believe that the future matters, are, as you say; “feeling quesey and sleazy.”
Much of Corporate America has been asleep at the wheel on this due to incongruent values. Change the values, change the result.
Eric,
Thanks for the comment. I agree values are important. They must be embedded into the systems. Publishing them in an annual report is not enough.
Michelle
[…] We Don’t Do Succession Planning As I said in my succession planning posts, I think the reason organizations say succession planning is important but don’t do it is […]