Succession planning
Succession planning refers to the procedure of identifying and developing employees to fill the responsibilities of roles in an organization. The focus of succession planning is not making the current managers or leaders dispensable, but rather ensuring the continuity of business and its growth. One of the advantages of succession planning is that it ensures employee retention. Many organizations provide opportunities for their employees to be promoted. When employees realize that there is transparency in their organization and are likely to advance, they are more likely to stay in the organization. Lowering expenses is another key benefit of succession planning. When an organization hires externally, it incurs expenses related to advertising, evaluation, and training. Effective succession planning keeps the costs from increasing and promote within. Another merit of succession planning is boosting performance. By providing employees with an opportunity of enhancing their skill set, it results is strong leadership besides strengthening departmental relationships. This leads to improved productivity and an array of innovative ideas.
Despite the advantages related to succession planning, leaders are faced with various challenges. The small and large organization experiences similar challenges related to succession planning. These challenges range from key structural issues to problematic finer points. One of the major challenges faced by organizations is deciding the person to promote. While an employee may be strong in their particular position or level, that may not necessarily imply they have got the talents or skills required to take the net position up the ladder. The second challenge is resisting bias, just like other situations where familiarity leads to comfort, hiring executives and managers face a similar issue. There exist a temptation to hire and an individual who fits the specific stereotype, thus overriding logical and skill-based thought procedures. The third challenge is maintaining the morale of an organization. Succession leads to a negative impact on organization morale since most people are worried about redundancy or retirement.
Summary and Evaluation of the Problem
Within the Sandusky Fire Department in Ohio, the concept of succession planning is not new. Nonetheless, the elements applied during succession planning have been adopted for many years by the private business industry. The business community became aware long ago that their survival and success within the corporate world was depending on the systemic approach for hiring as well as developing the future leaders and managers of their organizations. The organizations that select successors, based mostly on favoritism or nepotism, experience collapse, and failure. In this regard, the business community created models to be adopted in succession planning that emphasized on competencies and characteristics necessary to attain success. For example, they realized that value is generated in an organization when internal candidate pools are developed through mentoring and education programs. In addition, the business community realized the significance of utilizing external candidates when outside solutions were required by the organization.
On its part, the Sandusky Fire Department noted the existing failures related to the traditional test-only technique of choosing future leaders. Since history is responsible for failures occurring today and tomorrow, the Sandusky Fire Department applied a non-traditional assessment selection procedure that assessed strategies and tactics and general fire service knowledge besides assessing the problem of solving abilities and skills. Even though mentoring is a method that is not formally applied in many organizations, it was used as a component of experimental learning by the fire service. In addition, despite the rudimentary feature of the elements used in succession planning, they were also practiced by the fire service. Further improvements during the selection of candidate pool, provision of education opportunities besides mentoring programs were also realized.
The Sandusky Fire Department should look beyond the traditional and conventional means of leadership development. As a result of these succession strategies, the department was limited in the manner it would expand its operations and improve leadership. This implies that the department was required to look beyond the technique of test only candidates and deal with the need to develop leadership and management with purpose and continuity. The major problem was that the Sandusky Fire Department failed to establish a succession plan that could focus on developing future leaders who would improve fire services being provided by the organization. Due to the absence of this plan, the department is faced with threats on its purpose of the mission, continuity in incident command as well as safety of philosophy. In this way, the department faces an increased risk of injuries among the firefighters besides the loss of property.
Given the lack of effective succession planning that included the inability to create a procedure that identifies candidates with necessary skills and competencies that would support the mission of the Sandusky Fire Department, more related problems are likely to occur. For example, the department produced smart officers that did not share similar safety philosophy, mission, or incident management practices. Apart from increasing risk of property loss and injuries, Sandusky Fire Department will establish an environment of apathy that further increases risk, for instance, when firefighters do not wear personal protective clothing, seal bells, and fail to practice safe incident practices. In addition, the unsafe behaviors are passed on to new teams of firefighters since that is the way it has been done in the organization.
Plausible Solutions to the Problem
Creating a Succession Planning Procedure That Identifies Competencies and Offers Mentoring Opportunities
The Sandusky Fire Department should adopt a succession plan that identifies the competencies and skills of all employees in the organization. This would include providing education and mentoring opportunities, fair evaluation of the growth potential of the candidates, and accurately assess the commitment of candidates to the strategies adopted by the organization. The educational component of succession planning is important since it will eliminate fears of the unknown and reinvigorate individuals who are stagnated in professional development. Sandusky Fire Department can establish a working committee with a goal of fostering a cooperative work ethic and uniformity. The committee should be made up of representatives for the human resources department, city managers’ office, and civil service. In addition, the committee should incorporate legal advisors who will assist it in navigating through various civil service legal issues and labor-management concerns.
The working committee will adopt the improvement guide prepared by the members to help in the creation of succession planning that will ultimately result in a successful and positive transition of leadership in the Sandusky Fire Department. The outcomes or success of this procedure will be evaluated by reducing cases of property loss and the number of injuries among the firefighters. Additionally, leaders will be evaluated on the way they are consistent with safety philosophies besides uniform management of incidents.
Preparing Organization Successors
It is very interesting to watch a business owner step back and hand the leadership position to the next generation and do it willingly. This is clearly what the CEO of C-SPAN, Brian Lamb, did after managing the company, which he started more than 30 years ago. The thought of preparing the successor of an organization should be in the mind of every leader. Leaders should focus more on what they will give back rather than what they will give up. It is normal for executives to think about what they will leave behind when they step aside, including power and perks, but neither of these two privileges lasts forever. Legacy is the issue that stands the test of time and shapes the future of an organization (Smither, London, & Reilly, 2005). In the case of the Sandusky Fire Department, the leaders should have trained its current employees as a way of preparing them for a future position.
Developing Leadership Talent
The foundation for dealing effectively with staffing surprises is adopting succession planning. The survival of organizations in the current competitive global environment is determined by partly identifying and developing replacements for key leadership positions. This is the importance of succession planning. Leadership development implies improving the qualities of leadership in an individual and prepares him or her for expanded responsibilities. In case a surprise resignation takes place, it is not possible to immediately start a dormant succession process. This is based on the idea that appropriate succession planning entails more than the procedure of replacement planning (Pynes, 2013). It also involves a comprehensive program for developing employees. In case a leadership void occurs in an organization, it makes no sense to initiate a development process since it will not produce positive outcomes due to the longer time it requires before it is fully implemented. This means that leadership development strategies and succession planning must be linked to coherent and explicit approaches to best manage and improve the leadership talent of employees (Allen et al. 2004). In the case of the Sandusky Fire Department, the management should adopt strategies of enhancing the leadership of firefighters to ensure they are able to spear the organization in the future and establish a culture that will ensure continuity of its philosophies.
Impact of These Plausible Solutions
Adopting a succession plan that identifies the competencies and skills of all employees in the organization will positively impact the leadership of the Sandusky Fire Department in the future. While employees are employed based on their experience and skills, it is vital for the organization to establish a succession planning that will extend the performance of the organization and remain competitive (The handbook of nonprofit governance, 2010). On the other hand, by preparing the successors of the organization in reference to the leadership position, Sandusky Fire Department will have ready and effective leaders who will close any gap in case of a surprise leadership void. The development of leadership talent will also have positive impacts on the Sandusky Fire Department since the organization will not waste resources while hiring new talents. In addition, talented employees will pass the knowledge they possess to the next generation that will, in turn, push forward the philosophies of the organization.
Recommendations
In any organization, succession planning is important since it determines its continuity or failure. As noted earlier, by hiring externally, an organization incurs high costs associated with advertising, training, and motivating external talents. For the Sandusky Fire Department, the best recommendation is adopting a succession plan that identifies the competencies and skills of all employees in the organization. This is because the department will establish the weaknesses and strengths of the employees and establish training initiatives that are customized. In addition, the organization will save the resources of hiring from other fire departments in Ohio who are likely to ask for huge compensation. The use of the working committee, even though it may also require extra resources, is a better approach for the Sandusky Fire Department. The experts who will make up the committee will provide their expertise that will be utilized by the organization to improve its succession planning and avoid future failures.
Conclusion
Succession planning is important for an organization since it ensures retention of the employees, reduces the hiring costs, improves the performance of employees, and it increases the productivity of employees. Nonetheless, public administrators and HR managers are faced with various challenges while establishing succession planning. The case of Sandusky Fire Department in the state of Ohio is used in this paper as an example of how succession planning can impact on the performance of an organization. The department lacked a procedure that identifies candidates with the necessary skill and competencies that would support the mission. Out of the three possible solutions, the best recommendation is adopting a succession plan that identifies competencies and skills of all employees in the organization. The department should ensure that its employees are well-skilled regarding leadership matters and take all necessary steps to enhance their talents. Given the competitiveness in the industry, the organization will have the capability to have its future leaders and avoid the costs of hiring from other organizations.
References
Allen, T. D., Eby, L. T., Poteet, M. L., Lentz, E., & Lima, L. (2004). Career benefits associated with mentoring for protégés: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89, 17-36.
Pynes, J. (2013). Human resources management for public and nonprofit organizations. Electronic resource] a strategic approach (4th ed.). Jossey-Bass. (Chapter 10).
Pynes, J. (2013). Human resources management for public and nonprofit organizations. [electronic resource] a strategic approach (4th ed.). Jossey-Bass. (Chapter 13)
Smither, J. W., London, M., & Reilly, R. R. (2005). Does performance improve following multisource feedback? A theoretical model, meta-analysis, and review of empirical findings. Personnel Psychology, 58, 3-6.
The handbook of nonprofit governance. [electronic resource]. (2010). Jossey-Bass. (Chapter 12).