Succession Planning and Talent Management -
food for thought

Succession planning is featuring heavily in the HR press.

In our latest article - Succession Planning and Talent Management - we pull together some important questions, provide useful tips and outline a five stage process to help get to grips with succession planning whatever size your organisation.

We take a look at the risks and benefits of managing succession and debate the question about how structured or formal succession planning needs to be. The article aims to help you determine which are your key roles for which you need to identify the successor, how best to do this and then set up a talent pool, track the people in it and promote when possible.

As a complement to this, we also have the Succession Planning Checklist to help get you started.

Let us know what you think.

Talent Successor® - succession planning in action

Our new module Talent Successor® is about to be released. It'll provide the HR professional (as well as the HR Business Partner who has specific Talent Management responsibilities) with the capability to create and then interrogate talent pools within their business. It'll help them to plan how best to increase talent mobility within the organisation, to manage interims, to streamline succession planning and mitigate the business risk of your top talent leaving.

Talent Successor® will highlight those people who are both 'at risk' and ready for their next move - if they are high performing and have high potential, you know that their retention and progression within your organisation will be key to your organisation's growth.

We'll be launching this at the CIPD Annual Conference and Exhibition in Manchester in November but for a sneak preview of what it can do for you and be one of the first to see it, get in touch.

Business Partner case study - winning more business with a more competitive 360 service offering

When you're an HR-related consultancy or service provider, finding a supplier who is as flexible, approachable and client-oriented as you, can be key to differentiating yourself from the competition and in taking your business to the next level.

But identifying that supplier is no easy task in a market with many potential suppliers angling for attention. Progress International invested the time to find the right partner and in addition to working with them for many years, we are delighted to have supported their own winning bid to work with BUPA.

Read how we work together - and how our relationship is developing.
If you are interested in partnering with us, please get in touch.

Announcing our new Competence Framework

We've helped many customers identify the key competencies they need, build a framework and then use this across their Talent Management practices. We've helped others to shape the framework they already have in-house and we have worked with other organisations who have wanted to get up and running quickly and use us as licensees of the trusted Chartered Management Institute framework.

We're now adding something new to the mix. Our new multi-level, multi-role Competence Framework recognises that the world of work and the language used has changed, how over-played strengths become weaknesses and common career 'derailers'.

We have deliberately created it for the key Talent Management processes of selection, career planning, succession, performance management and development.

This Competence Framework is now available to Head Light customers old and new.
For more information, contact us.

Developing your Talent Management Strategy - Part Two

In Part One of our three part guide to developing talent management within your organisation, we looked at some of the questions to ask about your current people strategy and how best to get started - or refresh a strategy already in place.

Moving on from this, in this month's Part Two we look at the critical role business and line managers have to play in the day-to-day delivery of the talent strategy. We also look at the role of the competence framework (and read above our news about our own framework). Get Part Two here.

Watch out for Part Three next month when we will look at the practicalities of recruitment, performance management, succession planning, retention and engagement.

In the news...

Great to see the article in People Management - Performance Management: fine intentions - challenging what we do next with performance management. We would suggest a couple of points to add to their list of tips at the end of the article. We'd include:

Make it part of the everyday. All too often performance management is an annual event. Build a process, equip the managers and adopt an easy-to-use and easy-to-access way of noting what needs to be done so it becomes part of day-to-day working.

Review and track. Employees, managers and the organisation in general will only benefit it performance management is tracked, acted upon and reviewed regularly. Adopt a system that helps with this - you don't need to reinvent the wheel - but you do need a system to help you.

We've built 'Talent Performance®' so that it includes tools for employees and managers to engage in performance management making it a part of business as usual. These tools will help build the confidence in your managers to have those sometimes difficult conversations and to ensure that good work gets recognised and recorded.

Find out more about Talent Performance® and look out for further information in our Newsletter next month.