4

Assessing Your Organization

 

Getting Started With Assessment

You’ve done a lot of preparation. You’ve enlisted your succession planning team. You’ve created a positive message and communication system. And now it’s time to put both of those to use as you begin to assess your organization.

You’ll start out by determining the scope of your succession planning efforts, so you’ll know which types of assessments you need to perform.

Once you’ve decided on the scope of your plan, you’ll need to assess where your organization is right now by identifying what systems and what gaps exist. You’ll want to experiment to discover whether one-on-one interviews, focus groups, surveys, or a combination of assessment tools are the best fit for your organization’s structure and culture. This chapter outlines the questions to include in those assessments and supplies sample formats for collecting that information.

Determining the Scope of the Succession Plan

Determining the scope of a succession plan means deciding how many levels of leadership you want to include. Where earlier traditional plans might have included only the C-suite positions, companies are now realizing they need to plan for openings in more managerial levels. Additionally, supervisors and key positions in critical areas of the business may be included in a succession plan.

Your project team will want to take the time to assess current human capital, future needs, and changes in the industry to decide how deep into the organization succession planning should extend.

Here are some questions your team will want to consider so you can determine the scope of your succession plan:

• Is succession planning currently being done in any form? If so, how?

• What are the areas for improvement?

• Is there a current strategic plan for the organization?

• Is any succession planning linked to the strategic plan?

• Were any other succession planning techniques used in the past? Were these effective?

These questions, together with input from your senior leadership and a closer study of strategic plans for the next few years, will help you begin to establish the scope of your plan. If you don’t have a current strategic plan, or you want to do a more in-depth investigation, you can elect to perform a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis.

SWOT Analysis

If your organization is up-to-date on the challenges and opportunities in the current marketplace, you don’t need to worry about this step. But, if your company hasn’t completed a recent SWOT analysis, you might want to consider having your succession planning team conduct one so members can keep this information in mind as they go through the next steps of succession planning.

For example, if your group realizes that newly developed technology is going to represent a major opportunity for your organization, you might want to invite additional representatives of your IT department to act as resources to the succession planning team.

In its simplest form, this SWOT analysis can be accomplished quickly and effectively by using the input of your succession planning team:

• Brainstorm the items in Figure 4-1.

• Narrow down to five to10 items in each category.

• Discuss each item and potential implications to your organization and your succession planning efforts.

Although a SWOT analysis isn’t mandatory for creating your succession plan, it is a good exercise to get your team members thinking of the big picture.

Figure 4-1. SWOT Analysis Comparison

Strengths (Internal) Your business’s strengths, such as excellent employees, premium products, customer loyalty, marketing success, competencies of staff, training activities.	Weaknesses (Internal) Areas that could be improved such as products, services, customer service, systems, technology. You may even want customer input on this one.
Threats (External) While weaknesses are internal, threats are from external sources, such as new competitors, change in the marketplace, unfavorable legislation, or technology that will damage your position in the market.	Opportunities (External) Technological advancements or market trends may be your company’s opportunity. Your own weaknesses may even be the grounds for opportunity.

 

Defining Assessment Topics

To further define the needs of the organization, you can use questionnaires or focus groups to gather additional information. You might also have references or resources in your company that can answer some of your questions.

Following are a list of questions your succession planning team will want to answer. You can add or remove questions to tailor this list for your organization.

Organizational Assessment Topics

• What does the current organization chart look like?

• Are any reorganizations planned or needed?

• Are there any plans to open new offices or close existing offices?

• What direction is the company taking?

• How does this direction affect planning?

• What current vacancies exist in the organization, and what efforts are taking place to fill those?

• What are the replacement needs for those positions?

• How is the organizational culture changing?

• What other organizations would we like to use as examples?

Workforce Assessment Topics

• What do the demographics of the organization look like (for example, turnover, years of service, age, race, sex, educational levels, vacancies)?

• How do those figures compare with the benchmarks of similar organizations?

• How are the expectations of employees changing?

• Are there any significant performance or conduct issues?

• What functions will remain unchanged?

• What functions will be consolidated?

• What new technologies will be introduced?

• What are the current reward and recognition programs in the organization?

Marketplace Assessment Topics

• How are your customers’ expectations changing?

• Will technology changes affect the way you work with customers?

• What new services will be offered?

• What services may be discontinued or outsourced?

• What are other organizations doing that will affect your business?

• Are there any governmental changes in development that will affect your industry?

Determining Key Positions

Once you’ve learned more about your organization as a whole, you’ll focus your assessment on the key positions that will affect the future of the company. These are the ones that have the most effect on the stability, production, and profitability of the organization. Because these are linked to the operational and strategic objectives, management needs to be actively involved in identifying these positions.

Key positions are those that are necessary for the organization to reach its business goals. These will often include higher level management positions. Key areas will include critical occupational groups, such as technology, accounting, or marketing specialists, and can also refer to specific levels of the organization, such as executives.

These criteria statements can be researched to determine key positions:

• Is this one of the organization’s high-level leadership positions?

• Is this position critical to the organization’s strategic plan?

• Is this position linked directly to any current or upcoming business objectives?

• Would it have a major effect if we didn’t replace this position?

• Have high priorities been set on this position by executive input?

• Would this position be difficult to fill because it requires particular skills, competencies, or corporate knowledge?

Your team can determine which of these questions are most relevant for your organization and then rank each position based on the answers to these questions. This will allow you to create a scale with the highest rankings representing your key positions.

You’ll need to review and revise key positions regularly because they may change over time based on new initiatives in the company, technology advancements, and other factors.

Identifying Competencies for Key Positions

Once you’ve narrowed down the list of the key positions that need succession plans, you’ll want to assess what competencies are needed for those positions. Here is a basic-level analysis you can use to create competency lists for each of your key positions:

1. Gather a representative sample of employees for the subject areas. These will include the incumbents, subject matter experts (SMEs), supervisors, and others with in-depth knowledge of the positions. If you want a more in-depth analysis, you can also administer surveys, conduct focus groups, or use 360-degree feedback instruments to gather additional information on the positions.

2. Give this group the list of job responsibilities from the job description, performance appraisal forms, and any other current information on the key position.

3. Instruct the group to review the organization’s competency listing. (If your organization doesn’t use a competency listing, now is the time to decide on one from the many competency dictionaries that exist today.) The group will then study each job responsibility and list the competencies needed to successfully perform those tasks. Compile a list of the identified competencies.

4. Now the group will need to narrow the list down by discussion and voting on the top choices. Usually this will range from five to nine competencies.

5. The group will review the competency listing to determine the appropriate level of proficiency required for successful job performance. This will be done by rating two factors: task importance and task frequency. This step will also involve group discussion and voting to reach a consensus. This will create the competency profile for the key position.

Summary

In this chapter you’ve completed an analysis of your organization by using SMEs to determine which positions are the most vital at this point in the company’s development. You’ve assessed the strategic initiatives of the organization, so you know that you’ve used the latest goals and objectives to ensure that you are answering the current needs of your company. And you’ve evaluated each position to ensure that you know what competencies are needed to perform those duties effectively.

It’s time to pat yourself on the back. Not only have you done more organizational analysis than most companies will ever dream of, but you’ve also gotten what most organizations consider as the hardest part of the process behind you.

Now, armed with this information of the key positions and rankings of competencies, you’re prepared to go to the next step of comparing those competencies with the supply of potential leaders in your organization and discovering any gaps.

Getting It Done

This is the major fact-finding stage of succession planning. Armed with the lists of questions from this chapter, team members will conduct interviews, meetings, and surveys to create a picture of the current organizational structure and where it’s headed in the near future.

The team will review current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in a SWOT analysis of your organization to understand the issues that this succession plan will need to address.

Considering all this information, the team will then compile a list of key positions that are involved in these future directions of the organization. And, as a group, they will rank these positions.

Once they have created this list of key positions and key areas that need to be addressed, along with their rankings, senior leadership can help to determine how far into these position rankings the plan needs to extend.

The next step is when your organization’s HR specialists can really help the team. They can direct the review of job descriptions and help determine the competencies needed for superior performance of those responsibilities. The group, aided by HR input as well as information from the organization’s subject matter experts, will narrow down the list of competencies by determining which are most important for each position.

Once the team has all this vital information compiled, it’s ready to start seeing who in the organization meets those competency requirements and where gaps exist.