“Best practice succession systems are effective at spotting potential shortages of talent within the firm and identifying crucial linchpin positions – a select set of jobs that are critical to organizational success and need special attention.”
- Fulmer and Conger, Growing Your Company’s Leaders

Succession Planning

The process of identifying and preparing talent to fill future specialist, management and executive roles is recognized as an important and long-term - in fact, never ending - process for organizations.

Concord has amassed some important research and experience into one particularly challenging aspect of effective succession planning. In a number of organizational “verticals” e.g. Engineering or Accounting or IT or Operations, etc., the combination of “high performance” characteristics for an entry level Design Engineer has important differences to those required for an Engineering Supervisor. The high performance characteristics for an Engineering Supervisor versus those characteristics required for an Engineering Manager is again importantly different.  And finally, the high performance characteristics for an Engineering Manager is importantly different from those required for a Vice President of Engineering.

People don’t change their characteristics just because they have a new, or different job. Promoting the successful design engineer to an engineering manager may be promoting them to a role where their effectiveness decreases.

Talent Managers and organizational leaders often need to have a more radical and proactive approach to long term succession for a number of verticals in their organization. Concord Consulting can help organizations to evaluate the potential for this kind of complexity occurring in your organization. Our experience with many different industries and organizations, combined with our sophisticated job modeling technology will quickly – and accurately – help you to understand the best long term succession model to be applying to your various key organizational roles.

Not surprisingly, the building blocks for a sound succession plan are virtually identical to those required for making any successful talent selection – defining the role, finding the talent to match, and providing appropriate preparation/support.

Concord’s consulting experience and assessment technology provides organizations of any size, in any industry the tools to:

  • Develop clearly defined job behavior models for any position and evaluate the selection of appropriate competencies for the role;
  • Identify individuals with the inherent ability to be successful in specified roles and confirm their degree of motivation;
  • Shape an effective training and development strategy for qualified candidates and focus on the skills and experiences “missing” for ultimate success.

For further information on Concord’s Succession Planning services contact us, or visit Succession Planning for insight into the tools we use to develop succession models and evaluate Candidate (internal or external) potential.