Demand Side = Succession Planning
For most businesses, succession planning is an exercise reserved for the CEO and other C-level positions. Current best practices in the most expansive organizations have extended the planning process further down the management structure—senior management first, then through the organization levels two or three reporting levels, capturing more of the long-term planning needs for management in the organization. Measurement within succession planning has been virtually nonexistent. Having a plan in place, with buy-in from directors, was sufficient for Human Resources management to the executive level.
Depending on your organization’s attitudes toward succession, succession planning could mean several things (Burke 2002). In order of level of effort, succession planning could mean the things shown in Table 10.3.
| Replacement Management | Forecasting replacements and/or retirements. This has special urgency starting in 2008 with baby boomer retirement. |
| Succession Planning | Forecasting and staff development for the top areas. |
| Succession Management | Forecasting and staff development for all business areas. |
Admittedly, the idea of succession management may cross over into areas of workforce planning, learning, and development. However, the planning aspects of succession management cut to the heart of critical questions enabling a company to sustain and grow a competitive advantage. Among the questions to be addressed are:
We suggest that in the twenty-first century Human Resources organization, succession planning must be treated as the process closely aligned with succession management. The anticipated impact of the available labor pool combined with retirements (or semi-retirements) force the hand of Human Resources to plan farther ahead in building a workforce with sustainable human competitive advantage. It is through this lens that metrics have been suggested to assist management in making intelligent decisions on succession management of key positions. Some metrics are used to find vulnerable areas, others are used as tools to plan over the long term how to manage those vulnerabilities.
Managing Long-Term versus Short-Term Staffing. Any health care staffing manager understands the labor-force projections all too well—and looking at a graph of available nurses versus demand over the next 15 years proves the crisis in startling detail. There won’t be enough experienced nurses to staff the demand by a huge margin. The health care market may provide a glimpse into our collective futures in staffing shortfalls—the chronic staffing need, reactive hiring, and constrained budgets.
It is well understood by staffing managers in health care that they are fighting a long-term staffing problem with short-term budgets. This may be the reality in all of our staffing futures. Without metrics and a clear expression of the future need, there is little hope of funding the long term problem.