Succession Planning

Effective succession planning adds core competency mapping to our leadership development process discussed earlier.  It creates a clear understanding of the components of effective leadership for various management positions within the organization.  A well-constructed competency map can be very helpful to the members of your organization in providing direction and focus to their development efforts.  Mapping leadership attribute sets to an organization’s competencies helps the organization to identify and understand the specific leadership behaviors that each competency requires.  It then allows the organization to assess and develop its leadership talent using a set of development tools.  The process of competency mapping involves the following steps:

• Gain a thorough understanding of each competency.  Get as much information as you can about each competency, including a detailed description of it, the rationale behind choosing it, and the expected outcomes of developing it.  Identify specific examples of observable behavior that would or would not occur if people were demonstrating the competency.

• Given our knowledge of the competency map and the leadership attribute sets, determine the sets that would be most involved in developing and demonstrating each competency.  It’s important to keep the list of leadership attribute sets for each competency as short as possible; including only the sets that would be the key behavioral components of the competency.