Human Capital: Succession Planning and Management Is Critical Driver of Organizational Transformation
Released: 2003-10-01T00:00:00

Letter

Other Countries’ Succession Planning and Management Practices

Leading organizations engage in broad, integrated succession planning and management efforts that focus on strengthening both current and future organizational capacity. As part of this approach, these organizations identify, develop, and select successors who are the right people, with the right skills, at the right time for leadership and other key positions. We identified specific succession planning and management practices that agencies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom are implementing that reflect this broader focus on building organizational capacity. Collectively, these agencies’ succession planning and management initiatives demonstrated the following six practices. 1. Receive Active Support of Top Leadership. Effective succession planning and management initiatives have the support and commitment of their organizations’ top leadership. In other governments and agencies, to demonstrate its support of succession planning and management, top leadership actively participates in the initiatives. For example, each year the Secretary of the Cabinet, Ontario Public Service’s (OPS) top civil servant, convenes and actively participates in a 2-day succession planning and management retreat with the heads of every government ministry. At this retreat, they discuss the anticipated leadership needs across the government as well as the individual status of about 200 high-potential executives who may be able to meet those needs over the next year or two.

Top leadership also demonstrates its support of succession planning and management when it regularly uses these programs to develop, place, and promote individuals. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s (RCMP) senior executive committee regularly uses the agency’s succession planning and management programs when making decisions to develop, place, and promote its top 500-600 employees, both officers and civilians. The RCMP’s executive committee, consisting of the agency’s chief executive, the chief human capital officer, and six other top officials, meets quarterly to discuss the organization’s succession needs and to make the specific decisions concerning individual staff necessary to address those needs.

Lastly, top leaders demonstrate support by ensuring that their agency’s succession planning and management initiatives receive sufficient funding and staff resources necessary to operate effectively and are maintained over time. Such commitment is critical since these initiatives can be expensive because of the emphasis they place on participant development. For example, a senior human capital manager told us that the Chief Executive of the Family Court of Australia (FCA) pledged to earmark funds when he established a multiyear succession planning and management program in 2002 despite predictions of possible budget cuts facing FCA. Similarly, at Statistics Canada—the Canadian federal government’s central statistics agency—the Chief Statistician of Canada has set aside a percentage, in this case over 3 percent, of the total agency budget to training and development, thus making resources available for the operation of the agency’s four leadership and management development programs. According to a human capital official, this strong support has enabled the level of funding to remain fairly consistent over the past 10 years. 2. Link to Strategic Planning. Leading organizations use succession planning and management as a strategic planning tool that focuses on current and future needs and develops pools of high-potential staff in order to meet the organization’s mission over the long term. Succession planning and management initiatives focus on long-term goals, are closely integrated with their strategic plans, and provide a broader perspective.

For example, Statistics Canada considers the human capital required to achieve its strategic goals and objectives. During the 2001 strategic planning process, the agency’s planning committees received projections showing that a majority of the senior executives then in place would retire by 2010, and the number of qualified assistant directors in the executive development pool was insufficient to replace them. In response, the agency increased the size of the pool and introduced a development program of training, rotation, and mentoring to expedite the development of those already in the pool.

For RCMP, succession planning and management is an integral part of the agency’s multiyear human capital plan and directly supports its strategic needs. It also provides the RCMP Commissioner and his executive committee with an organizationwide picture of current and developing leadership capacity across the organization’s many functional and geographic lines. To achieve this, RCMP constructed a “succession room”—a dedicated room with a graphic representation of current and potential job positions for the organization’s top 500-600 employees covering its walls—where the Commissioner and his top executives meet at least four times a year to discuss succession planning and management for the entire organization. 3. Identify Talent from Multiple Organizational Levels, Early in Careers, or with Critical Skills. Effective succession planning and management initiatives identify high-performing employees from multiple levels in the organization and still early in their careers. RCMP has three separate development programs that identify and develop high-potential employees at several organizational levels. For example, beginning at entry level, the Full Potential Program reaches as far down as the front-line constable and identifies and develops individuals, both civilians and officers, who demonstrate the potential to take on a future management role. For more experienced staff, RCMP’s Officer Candidate Development Program identifies and prepares individuals for increased leadership and managerial responsibilities and to successfully compete for admission to the officer candidate pool. Finally, RCMP’s Senior Executive Development Process helps to identify successors for the organization’s senior executive corps by selecting and developing promising officers for potential promotion to the senior executive levels.

The United Kingdom’s Fast Stream program targets high-potential individuals early in their civil service careers as well as recent college graduates. The program places participants in a series of jobs designed to provide experiences, each of which is linked to strengthening specific competencies required for admission to the Senior Civil Service. According to a senior program official, program participants are typically promoted quickly, attaining midlevel management in an average of 3.5 years, and the Senior Civil Service in about 7 years after that.

In addition, leading organizations use succession planning and management to identify and develop knowledge and skills that are critical in the workplace. For example, Transport Canada estimated that 69 percent of its safety and security regulatory employees, including inspectors, are eligible for retirement by 2008. Faced with the urgent need to capture and pass on the inspectors’ expertise, judgment, and insights before they retire, the agency embarked on a major knowledge management initiative in 1999 as part of its succession planning and management activities. To assist this knowledge transfer effort, Transport Canada encouraged these inspectors to use human capital flexibilities including preretirement transitional leave, which allows employees to substantially reduce their workweek without reducing pension and benefits payments. The Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, a federal central management agency, found that besides providing easy access to highly specialized knowledge, this initiative ensures a smooth transition of knowledge from incumbents to successors. 4. Emphasize Developmental Assignments in Addition to Formal Training. Leading succession planning and management initiatives emphasize developmental or “stretch” assignments for high-potential employees in addition to more formal training components. These developmental assignments place staff in new roles or unfamiliar job environments in order to strengthen skills and competencies and broaden their experience. For example, in Canada’s Accelerated Executive Development Program (AEXDP), developmental assignments form the cornerstone of efforts to prepare senior executives for top leadership roles in the public service. These assignments help enhance executive competencies by having participants perform work in areas that are unfamiliar or challenging to them in any of a large number of agencies throughout the Canadian Public Service. For example, a participant with a background in policy could develop his or her managerial competencies through an assignment to manage a direct service delivery program in a different agency.

One challenge sometimes encountered with developmental assignments in general is that executives and managers resist letting their high-potential staff leave their current positions to move to another organization. Agencies in other countries have developed several approaches to respond to this challenge. For example, once individuals are accepted into Canada’s AEXDP, they are employees of, and paid by, the Public Service Commission, a central agency. Officials affiliated with AEXDP told us that not having to pay participants’ salaries makes executives more willing to allow talented staff to leave for developmental assignments and fosters a governmentwide, rather than an agency-specific, culture among the AEXDP participants. 5. Address Specific Human Capital Challenges, Such as Diversity, Leadership Capacity, and Retention. Leading organizations stay alert to human capital challenges and respond accordingly. Government agencies around the world, including in the United States, are facing challenges in the demographic makeup and diversity of their senior executives.

Achieve a More Diverse Workforce. Leading organizations recognize that diversity can be an organizational strength that contributes to achieving results. For example, the United Kingdom’s Cabinet Office created Pathways, a 2-year program that identifies and develops senior managers from ethnic minorities who have the potential to reach the Senior Civil Service within 3 to 5 years. This program is intended to achieve a governmentwide goal to double (from 1.6 percent to 3.2 percent) the representation of ethnic minorities in the Senior Civil Service by 2005. Pathways provides executive coaching, skills training, and the chance for participants to demonstrate their potential and talent through a variety of developmental activities such as projects and short-term work placements.

Maintain Leadership Capacity. Both at home and abroad, a large percentage of senior executives will be eligible to retire over the next several years. Canada is using AEXDP to address impending retirements of assistant deputy ministers—one of the most senior executive-level positions in its civil service. As of February 2003, for example, 76 percent of this group are over 50, and approximately 75 percent are eligible to retire between now and 2008. A recent independent evaluation of AEXDP by an outside consulting firm found the program to be successful and concluded that AEXDP participants are promoted in greater numbers than, and at a significantly accelerated rate over, their nonprogram counterparts.

Increase Retention of High-Potential Staff. Canada’s Office of the Auditor General (OAG) uses succession planning and management to provide an incentive for high-potential employees to stay with the organization and thus preserve future leadership capacity. Specifically, OAG identified increased retention rates of talented employees as one of the goals of the succession planning and management program it established in 2000. Over the program’s first 18 months, annualized turnover in OAG’s high-potential pool was 6.3 percent compared to 10.5 percent officewide. This official told us that the retention of members of this high-potential pool was key to OAG’s efforts to develop future leaders. 6. Facilitate Broader Transformation Efforts. Effective succession planning and management initiatives provide a potentially powerful tool for fostering broader governmentwide or agencywide transformation by selecting and developing leaders and managers who support and champion change. For example, in 1999, the United Kingdom launched a wide- ranging reform program known as Modernising Government, which focused on improving the quality, coordination, and accessibility of the services government offered to its citizens. Beginning in 2000, the United Kingdom’s Cabinet Office started on a process that continues today of restructuring the content of its leadership and management development programs to reflect this new emphasis on service delivery. For example, the Top Management Programme supports senior executives in developing behavior and skills for effective and responsive service delivery, and provides the opportunity to discuss and receive expert guidance in topics, tools, and issues associated with the delivery and reform agenda. These programs typically focus on specific areas that have traditionally not been emphasized for executives, such as partnerships with the private sector and risk assessment and management.

Preparing future leaders who could help the organization successfully adapt to recent changes in how it delivers services is one of the objectives of the FCA’s Leadership, Excellence, Achievement, Progression program. Specifically, over the last few years FCA has placed an increased emphasis on the needs of external stakeholders. This new emphasis is reflected in the leadership capabilities FCA uses when selecting and developing program participants. The program provides participants with a combination of developmental assignments and formal training opportunities that place an emphasis on areas such as project and people management, leadership, and effective change management.