Employees exit companies for various reasons—they retire, resign and move to another company, or face a series of unexpected events.
Without a succession plan in place, your company will struggle. These unexpected shifts can catch you off guard and hamper business operations.
Effective succession planning helps you groom top talents to fill vacated roles, preserve institutional knowledge and future-proof your company’s workforce.
In a study by Deloitte, 86% of leaders agree that succession planning is an urgent and top priority, but only 14% get it right. So we’ve created this article to equip your company for the future.
This article will run through how to plan and execute your company’s succession planning with ease. We’ve included ready-made templates to make the process a breeze.
Let’s get started.
Here’s a short selection of 8 easy-to-edit succession planning templates you can edit, share and download with Visme. View more templates below:
Succession planning is a strategy for passing on leadership or finding replacements for high-ranking organizational roles.
It is a common practice in human resource management that involves:
A succession planning strategy aims to ensure your company’s future is in good hands. Being a streamlined process, it strengthens the company and guarantees business continuity in the long term.
Here’s an excellent example of a succession plan template.
The common myth is that succession is a business process reserved for big organizations with structured HR or employee development departments. Well, it’s time to dispel that myth.
Let’s show you why company succession planning is a staple for your businesses of all sizes.
Uncertainties or changes are inevitable. Without a long-term plan, you’d be reactive in your business approach.
Planning for succession makes your company fail-proof. This is because your company becomes proactive in its growth as it journeys into the future.
The succession planning process creates a path where you can:
The global talent and skills shortage is a big deal. More than 75% of companies worldwide reported a talent shortage in 2022. By 2030 over 85 million jobs could go unfilled because there aren’t skilled workers
What does this mean? Competition for top talents will intensify and companies will struggle to recruit or retain them. The worst part is that replacing highly specialized workers is not only expensive but time-consuming.
Succession planning enables you to harvest vital skills and pass them down to a new generation of workers in your ranks. You can effectively fill the upcoming shortages in talent and mitigate the impact of a sudden or unanticipated vacancy in a critical position.
Every organization has institutional knowledge. This refers to the policies, strategies, expertise, values, experiences, information and data that make up the company or are possessed by their employees.
Succession planning helps you harness, preserve and transmit this knowledge across the board. This process reduces the gap between experienced staff and new employees and quickly brings everyone up to speed.
For example, your company’s sales or customer service processes could be a part of your institutional knowledge. By passing down this knowledge, your company can maintain service quality–regardless of the employees involved.
Most businesses invest a ton of money buying insurance and security systems for their organizations. Unfortunately, they ignore succession planning, leaving their business vulnerable.
Think of succession planning as insurance that requires grooming talents. Succession planning sets your company up for success as it journeys into the future. In addition, it shores up your business against unexpected events like illness, death, or the voluntary exit of top-ranked employees.
Succession planning requires your company or HR team to determine which positions are most crucial to the company's future success.
Armed with this information, you can find internal employees with the values, abilities and motivation to take on those crucial positions.
And if no internal candidates are fit for these positions, you’ll need to start searching externally.
It’s not enough to spot top talents. Business succession planning requires identifying the skills and competencies they need to thrive in their senior roles. Then you can begin to invest in their growth and groom them for eventual succession.
When employees are groomed for succession, they recognize their efforts and skills are valued enough to be considered for higher positions.
More importantly, it becomes a pointer that there’s an opportunity for juniors to climb the corporate ladder or advance into leadership positions. This visible investment in human capital can increase employee retention and boost engagement. It also enhances employees' morale and well-being as they feel wanted at the workplace.
The last thing you want to do is put people who have different visions or values with your company at the helm of affairs.
By grooming a successor, you can be sure your brand identity and values will remain intact or uncompromised.
Having gone through your ranks, your successors would imbibe your brand culture. They'll understand and strive to preserve your brand promise, philosophy and what the company stands for.
Succession planning is split into three critical phases. Each phase includes clear and actionable steps you can start implementing in your organization and tools to move you through the process.
Step 1: Determine your succession planning goals and align them with your workforce plan and company-wide goals.
Step 2: Identify significant business gaps and challenges in the next 1–5 years.
Step 3: Identify crucial roles and positions that will be required to drive sustainability or maintain business continuity. These are roles that, if left vacant, would make it almost impossible to achieve current and future business goals or carry out operational activities.
Create a survey to determine which roles are crucial for succession planning. You can tweak the template below to fit that purpose.
Step 4: Pinpoint skills, competencies, capabilities and institutional knowledge that are key success factors. These are skills required to achieve the company’s strategic objectives.
Step 5: Analyze how well the current talent pool will be able to fill these crucial positions
Step 4: Select high-potential employees and successors for these crucial roles.
To pick suitable candidates, discuss career plans and interests with employees. Then evaluate their performance and leadership skills in their previous role and their ability to thrive in higher positions.
Don’t forget to inform each protege that they’re being considered for top positions.
Step 5: Select the skills, knowledge and competencies employees will need to succeed in their positions and tackle identified business challenges. Next, align each protege’s learning and professional development journey with the knowledge, skills and abilities required for future roles.
Step 6: Harvest the knowledge that individuals possess before leaving the organization. Establish a blueprint for knowledge transfer from experienced employees to the ones understudying them, like mentoring programs, coaching and on-the-job training.
Step 7: Develop a pool of talent to step into critical positions through targeted career development strategies.
Consider creating corporate training programs to help employees harness or develop top skills. This ongoing process of training and development is part of a succession management strategy, during which employees are trained to fill higher positions in the future.
Employees' professional development may happen in different ways, like mentoring, coaching, task or job rotation, job shadowing, or handling advanced responsibilities.
The staff may be required to enroll in formal degree programs, courses, workshops or professional certifications.
With Visme, creating corporate training programs is a breeze. You’ll find everything you need to create stunning and engaging training materials.
Step 8: Assess and monitor the progress of your succession planning efforts. The goal is to ensure the following:
Set a reminder to review, compare and communicate the progress of your plan every 6–12 months. Track the effectiveness of your succession plan using metrics like bench strength, time to fill, career path ratio, diversity metric, retention, risk of loss and more.
You can use the template below to help you evaluate and report your progress.
With the right tools, business succession planning shouldn’t be a hassle. We’ve put together these easy-to-use templates to help you create disaster-proof succession plans for your organization.
This template is an excellent pick for creating a company-wide succession plan for employees. It captures detailed information about the objectives, critical positions, notable candidates, risk factors and short- and long-term career development plans for success.
Easily customize the document to add more sections or update the design elements to match your corporate branding. When done, download and share with stakeholders. Or print a hard copy and share it, so everyone is in the loop.
Develop an action plan to groom successors for managerial positions using this template. It offers a step-by-step guide and requirements for making your succession plan work, including:
What’s more? You’ll find a disclaimer that lets employees know the document is subject to change. In addition, you can quickly update personal and company information using dynamic fields when dealing with multi-paged projects.
The thing is, employees don’t always retire; they leave for various reasons. With this template, you can create a solid plan that ensures you aren’t caught off guard.
This template has a rich blend of bright and energetic colors that can help with engagement. Also, notice how the template uses a flow diagram to visualize the promotional process.
Visme has tons of features for creating the most incredible designs. Feel free to tweak the colors, text, fonts and other design elements. Tap into Visme’s library of high-resolution images, icons and videos to make your document easily digestible.
Solidify your company’s succession with this editable template that catches the eye. The template adopts a minimalistic design with stunning images to strengthen the narrative.
Customize this to align with your company’s strategy and goals. Highlight the criteria for choosing a director in your company and the skill balance for that role.
Incorporate your company’s training plan to close skills gaps and address training needs. Then share with higher-ups for review and implementation.
This succession plan example is your best shot if you’re looking to set your business up for long-term success. It provides a roadmap for grooming successors that will take your business to the next level.
Add interactive elements like hover effects or clickable pop-ups to make the document navigable and engaging. Also, take advantage of animated icons, GIFs, illustrations and special effects to make your document shine.
With a succession plan template like this one, you can boldly say your company is prepared for the future. The layout, typography and aesthetics have a professional feel, making it the ideal pick for companies of all sizes. Easily swap out the text, font and colors with ones that fit your needs.
Visme offers a number of charts, graphs and data widgets to enable you to visualize critical metrics and data points. Plus, it’s effortless to connect tables to live data or even connect an Excel file or Google Sheets to create live charts and infographics.
Business succession planning should be in silos; rather, it should be a collaborative activity involving all stakeholders. That’s where Visme templates shine.
Visme lets you add as many people on your team to your workspace. While working on the employee development plan, the HR team can tag each other, leave comments, react and resolve them. Assign user roles and view, edit and comment permissions to team members.
Drive effective collaboration across key stakeholders with the help of this template that captures all the important details about your company's succession. Invite everyone involved in the process to share their ideas.
This ownership succession template has an agro theme, making it the perfect pick for nature-inspired companies and social enterprises. The jazzy blend of vibrant colors can draw your audience's attention and get your message across easily.
It allows room for an executive summary, cases where ownership transfer can happen and the processes involved. To develop a more robust plan, include a list of potential successors, their share value, age, status and skills profile.
Here’s another stunning succession planning template to help you retain top talent in the pipeline. The template layout and design are sleek and slightly different from the usual. It has a dark background and white fonts with a mix of bright blue shapes, creating a strong visual contrast.
The beautiful part is that you can adapt it to any type of business or department. All you need to do is duplicate the plan and share it to enable each department to create its own succession plan for key roles. Simply add your logo, image, fonts and text to make it yours.
Don’t have a logo or image? Visme’s logo generator can help you craft the perfect logo. You’ll also find tons of premium and royalty-free images you can use right away.
Every business wants to avert moments of crisis and leadership gaps by preparing candidates for planned or emergency replacements. To do this successfully, you need a comprehensive succession plan example like this one.
It starts by outlining the main objectives of the succession plan and the critical tasks of an executive and the skills required. Furthermore, it details the strategies for choosing a successor, the profiles of the candidates being considered and the training and development programs lined up for them.
Switch things up by adding the flipbook effect, so your audience can interact with your document as if they were holding it in their hands.
No matter the size of your organization, make leadership transitions seamless and effective using this elegant template. The document describes the managerial persona and ideal profile of the next manager in your company.
Fill out this information and share it with the HR team to maintain consistency in your company’s recruitment process.
Then draw up a career development plan and training content tailored to each candidate, whether internal or external.
After sharing your document, tap Visme’s analytics tool to see who has viewed or taken action on your plans.
Without a successful succession plan, even the most successful companies can run off a cliff. They’ll resort to hiring leaders outside the firm who may struggle to fit in and become a huge gamble in terms of actual and intangible costs.
Here are ten best practices for ensuring your succession planning efforts hit the mark.
Identify what you want to achieve with your succession planning efforts. Common goals for succession planning are to:
Make sure your goals are S.M.A.R.T. as well, so you can evaluate your progress, successes and opportunities later. Brainstorm and develop SMART goals with the help of this easy-to-use worksheet below.
More importantly, align your succession planning goals with company-wide goals.
For example, the leadership and management team has outlined their goals for the next 5 to 10 years. Your succession plan should consider this and equip successors with the skills and experience required for the future.
Once you’re clear on your goals, the next step is to secure buy-in from the leadership team. Otherwise, your succession planning initiative will quickly hit a dead end.
It shouldn’t just end on the HR’s table. Instead, the leadership should drive it while the HR team facilitates the process and provides the required tools.
Since they are the decision-makers, you’ll receive ideas about improving the process and making it a fantastic experience for everyone.
For example, they may have great ideas about preserving and passing on the organization's values and institutional knowledge. They’ll also decide how to allocate budgets for corporate training and ensure the program is sustainable in the long term.
How do you secure management’s buy-in? First, conduct interviews with them, invite them to attend focus groups, take surveys and provide input.
Then draw up a detailed succession plan using this template. It covers every piece of information the board needs to make decisions.
Having an excellent successor starts with recruiting the ideal candidates. With a solid recruitment strategy, you can attract, hire and retain top talents that will fit into your succession plan.
Evaluate the candidate's background, experience and career goals during the recruitment and onboarding process. Also, look for qualities like potential, enthusiasm, hard and soft skills and cultural fit. Ultimately, gauge how they fit into your long-term succession strategy.
Remember, you don’t have to search for these traits only when recruiting for high-level openings. When hiring for low-level roles, look for gems that can be groomed for future leadership roles.
One big mistake most companies make is limiting their succession plans to C-suite roles. The thing is, some technical-level employees are as vital as leaders. And losing them without a successor can hurt your company and hamper your objectives.
When it comes to planning succession, remember to consider all the pivotal roles, not just the top-level positions.
Figure out which employees could be groomed as successors based on the future needs of your organization. Also, find out if those employees need training and what type.
It’s common practice to choose the next in line on the organization chart as potential successors. But we recommend looking beyond the obvious successors.
Who knows? The obvious choices may have different career plans or be uninterested in the position.
Look for proteges who have the skills to thrive in top-level positions and are buzzing to take over future roles.
If you haven’t already, speak to these employees about their professional and long-term goals before making your succession choices. You can easily find out how they feel and if they see a future with your organization. Of course, they are not a perfect fit if their plans don’t include climbing the corporate ladder.
Here's an excellent example of a succession plan.
Apple is one of many companies with a robust succession planning process. Before Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO in 2011, he spent years mentoring and grooming Tim Cook to succeed him.
Cook took on various operational responsibilities and worked closely with Jobs to acquire knowledge and skills relevant to the CEO role. In addition to gaining practical experience, he assumed responsibility for Apple's daily operations twice while Jobs was on sick leave.
An in-depth look at your organizational structure or org chart can help you uncover potential vulnerabilities such as skill gaps, training needs and a lack of candidates for critical roles. This can create a sense of urgency to hire or train employees for certain roles.
Visualize your organizational structure and identify potential successors using the template below.
Succession planning shouldn’t be a hushed activity. Instead, be open about it and maintain a high level of transparency with everyone involved.
Identify and open lines of communication with the people involved in the process about the positions. Be it executive roles, senior leadership or supervisory roles. This might mean creating a communication plan to share with internal stakeholders.
Let the outgoing employees know their role in making the succession plan work. Also, explain to each protege that they are singled out for top-level positions and why.
Establish the fact that there are no assurances and things can change at any time due to issues faced by the candidates, mentors or the company.
Now you know who your potential successors are. The next step is to invest in their training and career development.
If you already have corporate training programs in place, now is the time to step them up.
Conduct a skill gap assessment for each employee. Then build an individual professional development and training plan to fill any knowledge, skill, or experience gaps. To accelerate their development, consider incorporating strategies like:
This is an excellent time to do a trial run of your succession plan. For example, you can have a successor assume higher responsibility when a manager has gone on vacation.
These programs will help candidates gain additional knowledge and experience as well as boost their hard and soft skills.
Business succession planning shouldn’t be set in stone. Rather, it should be a fluid process capable of evolving.
As you invest in employees' professional development, make sure to integrate performance reviews into your succession planning process.
Periodic evaluations of your talent’s performance can help identify their strengths and weaknesses. Not only that, it confirms their ability to meet defined expectations and helps pinpoint areas for further development.
Visme makes performance reviews and employee evaluations a breeze. We’ve got a wide range of templates to do the heavy lifting for your HR team.
Conduct organized employee evaluations and provide helpful feedback using Visme's fully customizable performance review template.
The final step is to evaluate your succession plan based on the goals you set at the beginning. Then, review the process and results to determine what (if any) adjustments need to be made.
It can be challenging to measure success if you're just starting out. But as you iterate and attain a maturity level in succession planning, metrics like turnover rate, performance and impact of loss can help you measure its success rate.
The succession planning framework has three phases:
The four types of succession planning and the roles they pertain to are:
HR’s role in succession planning is, first of all, to identify possible candidates for succession. HR is also responsible for succession management, which keeps an updated roster of candidates and their learning and development progress.
Poor succession planning is essentially the lack thereof. A close second are succession plans that don’t properly train or groom high-potential candidates, which create gaps that lead to hasty hiring decisions.
It’s never too early to start succession planning. Technically, you should start succession planning for a position as soon as a person is hired for it. This rings especially true for leadership and critical roles.
There you go. Succession planning offers immense long-term stability for companies of all sizes. And we’ve equipped you with everything you need to kickstart yours now!
With Visme, the possibilities for strengthening your company’s training and succession planning processes are endless. Our comprehensive library is loaded with tons of templates for stunning training materials, succession plans, training manuals, performance reviews, reports, presentations and more.
Start empowering your HR team to attract, retain and groom top talents and maximize their full potential.
