Succession planning can feel like a daunting challenge for organizations of all sizes. From addressing an unclear career readiness plan to navigating an aging workforce, it’s a critical strategic activity. It’s also one that many leadership teams struggle to tackle alone. We sat down with Jess Young, a Work Friendly People Expert with over a decade of HR expertise to understand how Work Friendly helps businesses approach succession planning with clarity and purpose.
About Succession Planning
Q: What is succession planning, and why is it important?
A: Succession planning is a strategic exercise for organizations to understand their workforce needs deeply. It involves identifying potential leaders, addressing gaps in career readiness, and managing challenges like an aging workforce. Essentially, it’s about carving out a clear job analysis and aligning it with future goals to ensure the business is prepared for anything.
This process benefits not just the organization but also employees by providing transparency and opportunities for growth.
Q: How does Work Friendly guide clients through the succession planning process?
A: From day one, we aim to fully understand what your end goal of the project is. For our partners who don’t have a clear grasp on their current talent, we’ll seek to understand every single role through an in-depth job analysis. This can be done through forms, but we find one-on-one interviews are also extremely telling. These conversations uncover the nuances between roles, titles, and responsibilities. With those insights, we build career personas to better understand individual aspirations and align them with organizational goals.
Q: What is a career persona, and why is it important?
Career personas are key to effective workforce planning. For example, some employees aspire to leadership roles, while others feel more fulfilled in technical expertise positions. Both are equally critical to an organization’s success, and succession planning must account for both paths, especially when it comes to knowledge sharing.
By identifying these personas, organizations can better understand employees’ career journeys and create tailored development programs for long-term success.
Q: What happens after career personas are identified?
A: As Work Friendly builds out these career personas, we simultaneously identify core competencies. These competencies differ for each organization but are critical to meeting specific business needs. For example, we focus on categories like Core, Functional, and Leadership and define the proficiency levels required for each.
This ensures teams have a framework for both current performance and future capability-building.
Q: What’s the difference between a job description and a competency model?
A: A job description outlines tasks. A competency model, however, defines the outcomes of those tasks. Competencies help employees understand their roles on a deeper level and clarify how they contribute to the organization’s success. At the same time, competencies make it easier for managers to track and measure performance.
Q: What is the final step in succession planning?
A: To bring all these insights together, Work Friendly delivers the findings in a tool called the Ladder & Lattice visualization. This visualization offers a digestible overview of career paths and opportunities within the organization. It can be shared among leadership or even implemented company-wide to provide employees with total career transparency.
Often, our process reveals gaps holding back succession planning, such as missing entry-level roles or inadequate mid-management structures. We work to address those gaps as part of the final deliverables.
The Work Friendly Difference
Q: What sets Work Friendly apart in succession planning?
A: This is a very robust and intensive process bringing lots of data points together to get you to a succession plan. Most of our clients come to us unsure of where to start or urgently needing to address specific pain points. That’s where we come in—not as consultants giving you a final piece of paper, but as an extension of your HR team, ready to roll up our sleeves and do the work.
We embed ourselves in the organization, becoming part of the team, and we don’t rely on templates. Every solution is fully tailored to the client’s unique needs.
Q: How does Work Friendly ensure long-term success after the process?
A: Succession planning doesn’t end after the succession plan is delivered. Work Friendly owns everything from start to finish, including training your managers and creating detailed step-by-step documentation. This ensures that our clients have all the tools they need to thrive in the long term. As a bonus next step, we can help you with succession readiness, i.e. talking your executive leadership team through all the data points in order to choose the right successor, determining when they will be ready to succeed, and what a successful knowledge transfer looks like.
About Jess Young:
With 11 years of experience working with Fortune 500 companies and fast-growing startups alike, Jess has cultivated a deep understanding of what it takes to build strong, effective people programs. Her work focuses on not just optimizing existing systems but also creating customized solutions from scratch that drive results.
