Q. What’s the next step in
the process?
If that employee is a star within his own department, but if
we think he has talent to move up into a managerial position,
we might move him to another
area so he gets a broader experience level.
If that employee lacks some
education, then our HR people
will sit down and talk to him
about taking classes at the university or seminars on particular
topics that would make him better suited to take that next step.
The term ‘talent management’
is truly that: We’re trying to
manage that talent, and identifying it isn’t enough to have a succession plan. What do you do
then? It’s taking those people
and trying to figure out No. 1,
what do they want to do? No. 2,
how do we help them get to
where they want to go? And No.
3, how do we make that work
within our organization?
Q. How can other companies
create a succession plan
committee?
The CEO’s role would be to
get your director of HR to
organize everything and set the
committees up. Get your people to identify the stars.
If you’ve got 250 employees,
it’s very easy to overlook one or
not know how well they do
things. It will become apparent
when you do these meetings.
It’s worked really well for us.
We have different departments in three different performance review cycles, so it’s
going on all year long, and we
do those star committee meetings in conjunction with the
performance reviews. The
department heads take great
care in doing performance
reviews because they know
they’ve got to tell the committee who they think their good
people are.
HOW TO REACH: Signature Worldwide, (800) 398-0518 or www.signatureworldwide.com
