As human beings we are often guilty of not planning for negative events. We like the status quo and so like to assume that the status quo will be maintained forever. Of course reality often proves otherwise. As a sports fan the sporting world never fails to provide telling evidence of this. The Indian cricket team for instance have failed to do anything to negate the looming retirement of their legendary middle order, and having been roundly thrashed by both England and now Australia are set for a difficult time.
Likewise Manchester United have failed to plan for the retirement of Paul Scholes, to the extent that he has now come out of retirement to fill in the yawning gap in central midfield. You'd like to think that this experience will have driven home the importance of succession planning, especially as Alex Ferguson cannot go on forever. History would suggest otherwise however.
What about your community manager? I like to think that we fill a useful role in our organisations and that should we depart that the things we do will be both difficult to replace and sorely missed until a replacement is found. Yet a poll by SmartBrief has found that 72% of companies have no succession plan in place should their community manager leave.
This is not new. A KornFerry survey recently found that 65% of companies have no succession plan in place for their chief executives either, despite 98% regarding the issue as important.
So how can you plan for your community managers departure? Here are a few steps you can take to mitigate against this risk.
- Identify the skills needed – I wrote last year about some of the key skills required to be a community manager. Your internal talent management plan should help you identify people with those skills.
- Find successors – I've spoken about the importance of making social business a cultural thing, something that isn't confined to the marketing or IT departments. Therefore you should hopefully have a wide range of potential replacements to fill in.
- Develop talent – Plans are very nice, but they don't achieve much on their own. To be effective you actually have to develop skills and talent, not just plan to do so. So make sure your focus is on actually developing the talent rather than planning to do so.
- Work on your culture – All of this is really tough unless you have a culture of talent development in your organisation. If you're looking for measurable metrics to gauge how successful you are, it could include things like:
- how many vacancies are filled internally?
- what percentage of promotions come via the talent pool you've created in step #2
- Be realistic – We tend to be pretty poor at self analysis – a so called illusory superiority. You need to be realistic about how attractive you are as an employer, how successful your plans are and so on. So when you're setting out your plans, be realistic about what to expect and the current state of things. Don't be tempted to sugar coat things.
I'd be interested to hear from you if your company has a plan in place should you move on? Are you part of a talent pool in your company?
Despite the rhetoric, the number of companies that actually care about talent is really small. Most HR departments I've come across are only concerned about recruitment and fulfilling legal responsibilities. They do very little on actually managing talent.
When management is engaged in succession planning, an org chart can be very useful for highlighting and selecting suitable successors for upper management positions. Most positions require special skill sets and qualifications in order for the company to continue and transition smoothly with the successor in place. An org chart can include relevant skills, anticipated retirement dates and other pertinent information useful during succession planning. If an unexpected vacancy occurs, having a considered succession plan within the org chart can minimize the disruption on the organization.