Using Talent Pools for Succession Planning

How do you measure your succession planning program effectiveness? For many companies, it's simply a measure of whether a program is in place and managers have identified successors. A better approach is to measure whether talent risks are mitgated and a good way to do that is to use talent pools. In this article, I’ll cover five reasons why talent pools are needed for good succession planning.

Talent pools are lists of people with specific skills or capabilities to meet an organization's future needs. In order to build a talent pool, HR must understand the organizational strategy, key skills, and talent risks for critical jobs.

1. Agility in Talent Identification

In traditional succession planning, it is usually a leader’s responsibility to identify who could be her successor if she were to leave her job.  Yet, in today’s highly mobile and agile organizations, many excellent potential successors are not known to the incumbent leader.

Talent pools allow organizations to identify potential leaders from broader groups, including other company locations and departments, not just those in the leader's department. Talent pools can support a broader group of employees, contractors, or even external candidates. This agility in talent identification enables businesses to respond swiftly to unexpected leadership gaps and emerging opportunities.

2. Talent Pools are Better at Diversity and Inclusion

Talent pools have greater potential to advance diversity, inclusion, and belonging (DIB) where traditional succession planning tends to favor individuals who conform to existing norms and often leads to a more homogenous leadership team.  In contrast, talent pools consider a wider range of candidates, taking into account skillsets, backgrounds, and unique perspectives.

In addition, Talent Pools extend the geography of consideration.  By including data like ‘willingness to relocate,’ talent pools can include candidates from across the country or globe.  The resulting diversity fosters innovation and aligns with equal opportunities and diverse representation.  Talent Pools can also invite the gentle hand of DIB trained talent specialists in influencing selection for key roles.

Talent Pools can increase diversity

3. Continuous Learning and Development

Development planning for succession candidates is often crafted by managers of different skill levels resulting in inconsistent outputs. This approach is hard to administer and operationalize due to the varying manager standards.

With talent pools, it is easier to assign a well-defined curriculum for the entire talent pool. Standard curriculum can address broader skills gaps and give more employees exposure to critical training, making candidates more consistently prepared for the challenges of leadership.

Managers can still play a role in recommending development programs, but well-designed talent pools linked with learning paths offer more standardization and more flexibility in career growth and development. In other words, there should be standards complemented by flexible options.

4. Skills-Focused with Innovative, Fresh Perspectives

Talent pools are better for cultivating innovation. By considering individuals from various backgrounds and experiences, organizations can tap into new ideas and approaches. Traditional succession planning can inadvertently stifle innovation by favoring those trained in one specific leadership style or practice.

Talent pools can encourage diversity of thought, pushing organizations to evolve and stay competitive. For example, by considering an up-and-coming manager from another location, the organization can benefit from 'cross-pollination' of leadership styles. Additionally, talent pools are constructed based on required and emerging skills, not a leader's personal preference, thus reducing bias.  Using a skills-based approach enables organizations to see candidates who may come from previously unconsidered departments or locations, the very people who can foster innovation and fresh perspectives.

5. Mitigating Risks

Succession planning often carries the risk of putting all the leadership eggs in one basket. If the chosen successor does not meet expectations, faces unforeseen challenges, or leaves the company, it can increase risk and impact on the organization. Talent pools spread the risk by having a broader pool of potential leaders. If one candidate faces difficulties, there are others who can step in, reducing the organization's vulnerability. Talent Pools themselves can then be looked at from a risk perspective.  Are there a sufficient number of up-and-coming candidates in this talent pool?  If not, address the risk and build the pool.

Talent Pools can reduce talent risks

A Talent Pool Success Story

I supported a national logisitics organization that was practicing the traditional model of succession planning. Each lead manager would designate one or two successors in each of its 70+ sites across 30 states. Potential successors had designations like 'ready now' or 'ready in two years' (sound familiar?). Some sites had no one ready to take on leadership. In the end there were 100 or so separate plans, some complete, some incomplete, some not even started. They were sometimes dusted off when there was a vacancy.

We converted the program to a talent pool with all of the up-and-coming assistant managers into one talent pool for future lead managers. The results were excellent. The best performing Mid-Western region soon had it's well-trained assistant managers filling lead roles in other states. Many employees became more engaged knowing that they didn't need to wait for their boss to retire so they could move up in ranks. Leaders and HR now had one place, a well designed talent pool, to look for candidates rather than to wade through 70+ individual succession plans. Talent risk decreased as talent mobility increased.

When Traditional Succession Planning is the Right Approach

Traditional succession planning was well-suited for the pre-modern HRIS days (i.e., 1970s to 2000s) when plans were often maintained in confidential binders or locked cabinets. Modern HRIS systems like Workday, Oracle, SAP, HiBob, and UKG have digitized succession planning and talent pool capabilities, yet, the systems won't tell you when to use one or the other. As a basic principle, always start with Talent Pools, then consider Succession Planning when a robust (i.e., quantity and quality of candidates) talent pool doesn't exist. Traditional succession planning is also important for those few hyper-critical roles in an organization like the C-Suite and perhaps some critical roles like Product Manager of a flagship product or head of cyber-security in an infrastructure intensive organization.

Remember, the goal is to reduce talent risk, not to complete a number of succession plans.

Conclusion

While traditional succession planning has been a cornerstone of leadership development for years, talent pools offer a more dynamic, inclusive, and forward-looking alternative that should be a key tool to address talent risks. Today's organizations need agility, diversity, and innovation in their leadership development strategies. Talent pools provide precisely that, making them a superior choice for organizations committed to long-term success. Embracing talent pools means embracing more talent mobility and mitigating talent risks.

Lastly, implementing talent pools requires HR to up its game as a strategic talent advisor. Creation and curation of talent pools becomes a new HR task, but it lifts a burden from business leaders and improves quality. I've found this switch to be very welcome by business leaders and HR alike. It just takes a clear vision and a good implementation plan.