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Good will, responsibility and participation are the heart, the spirit of our vision. View Results. Current Projects. NGO database. Event Calendar. Today the average age of those heading the global lines of business is mid-forties to early fifties, which means that people wait longer to step into the role.

Succession planning and leadership development are natural allies because they share a vital and fundamental goal: getting the right skills in the right place.

One way to provide general management experience in this environment is to launch small joint ventures or internal enterprises. Managers can also make lateral moves across functions and business units. And a future leader in the research organization was named vice president for purchasing, to broaden her expertise. The GDR is a periodic, in-depth review of a single person, involving input from both past and present supervisors the employee is not present for the meeting.

In a facilitated minute discussion, the group identifies the next steps the employee should take, gathering input from others in the organization if necessary. The immediate supervisor then shares a summary of the results with the employee, who, with the supervisor, is responsible for incorporating the feedback into his or her development plan.

During the review his current and previous supervisors concluded that he was overly dependent on his strategic-thinking skills and needed more operational experience before he could be promoted to the executive level. Whereas succession planning generally focuses on a few positions at the very top, leadership development usually begins in middle management.

Collapsing the two functions into a single system allows companies to take a long-term view of the process of preparing middle managers, even those below the director level, to become general managers. Succession management systems should focus intensively on linchpin positions—jobs that are essential to the long-term health of the organization.

In a professional services firm, for example, the partners managing industry sectors such as chemicals and automotive would be in linchpin positions, as would partners managing emerging sectors such as biotech.

By monitoring the pipeline for these jobs, companies can focus development programs on ensuring an adequate supply of appropriate talent. But the company considers the plant manager role to be a linchpin position because it is the first opportunity for managers to be responsible for multiple functions as well as labor and community relations. The result is a pool of potential successors rather than a few leading contenders. In the process, every plant manager is scrutinized for strengths and weakness.

For example, there might be a plant manager who has potential for promotion but has lived all his life in a small Southern community.

Having identified him as someone with high potential, Sonoco can design a particularly tempting assignment, one that would be difficult for him to pass up.

Many companies use a matrix to look at the individual strengths and weaknesses of employees in linchpin positions and to assess the strength of an entire group. The matrix shown here is an example of a tool used by Bank of America to review its talent pool the names have been changed.

This type of matrix is typical of the tools we found in the best-practice organizations we studied. The vertical axis tracks performance results. One major national retailer, which was having difficulty finding talented people to fill a broad range of management roles from the officer level all the way down to the regional managers, decided to deal with this situation by treating all those roles as linchpin positions.

The company began conducting talent review sessions for these positions, during which HR managers and the executives responsible for the roles discussed the people currently in the positions and their likely replacements which were few. In the process, they learned that these positions were generally filled through serendipity—when a job opened up, it went to whoever was on the radar screen.

Today the company has a systematic approach to building the pipeline, which allows it to gauge bench strength more accurately, and it now uses the regional manager role as a way to give promising store managers developmental experiences that will groom them for more senior roles.

It allows for last-minute changes of heart without the need to deal with dashed expectations or angry reactions. A transparent succession management system is not just about being honest. Employees are often the best source of information about themselves and their skills and experiences. And if they know what they need to do to reach a particular rung on the ladder, they can take steps to do just that.

In fact, an increasing number of companies are making employees themselves responsible for keeping the data in their personnel files up-to-date. To curb the urge to exaggerate experience, supervisors review the plans. We identified six organizations that had achieved a high degree of success in succession management—Dell, Dow Chemical, Eli Lilly, PanCanadian Petroleum, Sonoco Products, and Bank of America—and compared their best-practice approaches with those of the sponsoring companies.

We used two principal methods to gather information across the two samples: detailed questionnaires to collect quantitative data and site visits that included in-depth interviews.

Our objective was to understand how the best-practice companies differed in their approaches to succession management and to learn more broadly about trends and challenges in the field. A few companies even allow people to know exactly where they stand in the succession system. Employees, who were accustomed to candor and transparency, found the system overly authoritarian, so they refused to participate.

In the end, the company gave employees unrestricted access to their own information. Most companies elect to limit transparency in some way. To achieve transparency, companies need systems that are simple and easy to use, with immediate but secure access for participants. Technology—and in particular the Internet—is a powerful enabler. With the information directly in front of employees, succession management becomes less another planning event and more an ongoing activity.

They also use it as a general querying and reporting tool. For example, HR managers can download a report showing what marketing positions are available in Europe, which candidates are being groomed for such positions anywhere in the world, and any skill gaps that might make it difficult to fill the jobs. The system also lets managers download statistics on the talent pipelines, such as the ratio of potentials to incumbents, specific data related to gender and ethnicity, and the percentage of employees with international and cross-functional experience.

With the ability to search for multiple criteria, HR managers can view any segment of the organization with one query—from functional views like marketing to geographical regions like Latin America. Like Lilly, most of the best-practice companies we studied now rely on Web-based succession management tools to promote greater transparency and ease of use.

At Dow Chemical, employees nominate themselves for positions online, and if a hiring manager has a preferred candidate, he or she must state this along with the posting. Some companies even show compensation ranges by level and position.

No longer is it sufficient to know who could replace the CEO; instead, you must know whether the right people are moving at the right pace into the right jobs at the right time. The ultimate goal is to ensure a solid slate of candidates for the top job.

But when succession plans were consolidated at the corporate level, a single employee, Roger Jones, was found to be the potential successor for most of the key jobs at the company.

Sonoco now requires each division to generate most of its own successors from within. Supporters contribute to community involvement in promoting heritage architecture in Cambodia. Add your name or organisation to our mailing list, join our events or offer assistance by donating time, materials such as books, plans, papers and photographs or expertise.

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