Dive Brief:
- Only 4 in 10 respondents to an Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) survey said their organizations are effectively building “bench strength” or maintaining a pool of strong, qualified internal candidates who can step up into a leadership role, per a report released Wednesday. The survey tapped close to 800 global business and HR leaders for their opinion.
- Only 18% of respondents could say succession is “highly integrated” into business planning overall, with only 14% reporting “strong integration” into workforce planning.
- These findings come amid reports that leaders already feel poorly equipped to navigate change in general, further complicating the talent landscape for HR professionals.
Dive Insight:
The crux of i4cp’s advice is that while companies have “succession templates in place” a more strategic approach is needed. One way to do that is to build leadership depth across roles but to also remain flexible amid a changing business environment rather than rely on structure alone, Tom Stone, co-author of the i4cp report and the firm’s senior research analyst, said in a statement.
Succession planning is a key HR function often lost amid a sea of other duties. But companies with a strong internal talent pool are more than 2.5 times as likely to be “high-performance organizations,” i4cp said, and about 7 times as likely to say that succession planning went well.
Conversations about leadership in peril continue to be a hot topic, with a recent report from Insights suggesting most business leaders underestimate the impact of change. As executives and HR professionals grapple with head count changes and disruption from restructuring, the imperative to look once more at succession planning becomes clear, researchers found.
“Too many succession conversations still begin with who is next in line, when the more important question is what leadership the future strategy will require. That shift changes the work,” Heather Foust-Cummings, co-author of the i4cp report and the firm’s vice president and senior research analyst, said in a statement. Building readiness will be crucial to “strengthen the depth and mobility” across a company, Foust-Cummings added.