Having top talent leave can be devastating
Sports teams have key players leaving all the time. This might be due to injury, moving to another club or due to retirement. Coaches constantly build talent.
You should too.
Businesses, like sports teams, want ‘A’ players in every position with replacements identified and in the wings. ‘A’ players are those top performers who consistently deliver and live the values of the organisation. Are you constantly raising the standard of your current talent pool with ‘A’ players in all positions? Do you have a clear idea as to who will replace who, including replacing you?
What do you do when your top people leave?
Do you have a plan?
Recruiting and retaining top talent is a key success factor for any business.
To develop a succession plan staff should be regularly reviewed as to who needs training and development so that they are able to step into a new role?
Identify Key Competencies
A good place to start when developing your plan is to do a skills/competency analysis for each position in the company
Identify the 3-5 key competencies required to be effective and productive within each role?
Create a table of all employees with two columns. One column for skills and the other for supervision.
Now rate each person for skills on a scale of 0 to 3, where 3, ‘exceeds requirements’, 2, ‘meets requirements’, 1, ‘below requirements’ and 0 means the person does not have the skill required.
You can use the same scale for level of supervision required for each role with 3 beings, ‘can supervise others’, 2 ‘can work independently’, 1 ‘needs supervision’, and 0 ‘cannot perform the task’.
This will help identify gaps, training needs and areas of concern. Which positions are vulnerable if the incumbent leaves or gets injured? Who needs development and in what areas? Do you have a successor identified for each position?
For those identified with ‘below requirements,’ you need to ask the tough questions. Is it a training issue or are they new to the role? Are they trainable? Do they live your company values? Do they fit the company culture? If they are a poor performer then maybe you need to manage them out of your business.
Companies grow and therefore become more complex resulting in some people getting out of their depth. Is the job now beyond them and if so what action will you take? This could be to transfer them to a role more suited to their capabilities.
A spin-off from training and developing your staff is they see development within themselves and become more engaged. As a result, financial
Investing in training staff reminds me of the story of the consultant talking with the CEO about training where the CEO said, “I don’t train my people as if I do they might leave”. to which the consultant replied, “And what if you don’t train them and they stay”