Succession Planning Using SWOT Analysis

Talent Management as Seen Through a Really Interesting Client.

One of my great pleasures in my job as being a salesperson at Skills DB Pro is to learn from my clients. Recently, during a demo, a super-smart head of HR explained to me how he uses Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats analysis in his daily recruitment, retention, and succession planning. So, I wanted to share a part of his story.

First, he explained to me, precisely what are the most essential steps to enhancing your succession planning approach? He believes the best way to quickly evaluate your present scenario is to position a SWOT framework; for preparing a strategy to utilize.

In fact, he prefers this strategy because you can easily utilize and expediently recognize both internal (weaknesses and strengths) as well as outside (opportunities and risks) which can be impacting your outcomes.

Succession Planning Through SWOT

According to him, phase #1 is to determine the pros and cons of your company’s present succession planning approach. In particular, the ten elements here, are bolded inside a positive statement about them.

After looking at each assertion, just be aware of whether or not that assertion is generally true or not for your succession planning scenario. Also, it is best in this kind of exercise to lean conservative in your opinion as well as to not over-estimate performance in which there is uncertainty. This process will make it very easy to differentiate the variables into specific, good, and bad points. So, ask yourself the following:

1. The planning business possesses strong awareness of the succession needs (timing, quantity, quality, etc.) of the company’s strategic business plan.
2. Reliable and complete job details at the start routinely results in an experienced prospect that closely matches needs.
3. There exists discipline around segmenting sourcing initiatives based on the role’s criticality and marketplace accessibility to skills wanted.
4. The right expertise to meet company needs will be consistently (Employee Goal Management- 5 things you must know!) sourced by making use of a tactical mixture of sourcing channels.
5. The talent tracking software as well as other technologies greatly improve the ability to perform the succession planning process.
6. Engaging people for their new job on day one results in little talent loss.
7. Manager partnerships along with manager responsiveness make it possible for effortless process execution.
8. Your Business’s agility allows you to react quickly to changing situations.
9. Administrative actions that HR must spend in the amount of time needed for succession planning tend to be nominal.
10. Management facilitates people for their new roles.

Opportunities and Threats

Next, using the identical strategy as previously mentioned, determine the outside opportunities and threats posed by the skill marketplace as well as your talent rivals by reading through these assertions and categorizing them all:

1. The overall trustworthiness of the company is an advantage in the marketplace.
2. The company brand name is designed to project what is important to new job role prospects.
3. The strategic succession planning approach appropriately deals with the realities of the present economic climate.
4. Supply and demand for expertise the company demands most are reasonable.
5. Expertise needs for the company are often equally satisfied across geographies.

Succession Planning SWOT Results

Using this kind of exercise, you can now stand back and see what you have discovered. The internal strong points you discovered could be used to make use of relevant outside opportunities, as well as to aid in reducing threats.

The biggest benefits are frequently in isolating weak points. Dealing with weak points is at the heart of your near-term organizing strategy with this objective simply being to reduce, neutralize or even, preferably, reverse them. In addition, reversing a weak point enhances the strong points that will permit opportunistic actions and decrease threat.

Determining the “what” will be the first step toward setting up to enhance the succession planning approach.  Plunging further into te actual “why” (weak spots exist), as well as how to correct them can be the target of inside teams or perhaps maybe professional third-party talent succession specialists.

After chatting with our client, I found this simple approach can add to your understanding of how to entice top-notch talent into your succession plans.