Succession and Replacement Planning

Succession Planning

As your business grows, your employees do too. As their careers progress they may no longer be best off in your business and seek to go elsewhere. 

Or perhaps as you scale you’re pushing your high performers further up the hierarchy, creating a need for their replacement.

Not to mention, at the end of most careers is the goal of retirement. Staff leave not to go elsewhere but to exit the workforce. With the ageing population and workforce, we’ll likely see an uptick in these retirements over the next decade.

In all of the above cases, these employees may be leaving a crucial role within your business. A role that, if left unfilled, stands to have a significant impact on your ability to deliver to clients or meet organisational goals.

Succession planning is an active and ongoing process within businesses and other organisations that seeks to prevent or mitigate these impacts. Such a process is centred around creating a talent pipeline.

This talent pipeline ensures training, up-skilling, and cross-skilling in staff. This way, succession is made easier and more efficient as key staff leave the organisation. 

Replacement Planning

Replacement planning differs from succession planning in that it is preparing for a temporary replacement of a staff member in a key role. These replacements can be short-term and long-term, but are almost always a critical and urgent matter. 

When a critical position is unable to be executed due to a staff member’s leaving or unavailability, a replacement must be found quickly. Rather than waiting until this need arises, replacement planning relies on proactively identifying people that can assume the responsibilities of these roles when needed.

A replacement can be sourced from the internal talent pool, or from outside of the company. 

Replacement planning can complement succession planning efforts in that one of the potential candidates for succession of a role could be selected for the temporary replacement of unavailable staff. This appointment is an opportunity to familiarise the candidate with responsibilities that may one day be theirs, and to test how ready they may be in the need of succession.