Examining Succession and Replacement Planning in Work organizations

Abstract

Succession planning and replacement planning are both strategies that are incredibly important to the lifeline of any organization. Succession planning is a deliberate and systematic effort by an organization to ensure leadership continuity in key positions, retain and develop intellectual and knowledge capital for the future, and encourage individual advancement. Replacement planning is the process of identifying short-term and long-term emergency backups to fill critical positions or to take the place of critical people. This paper examines the role of succession and replacement planning in improving organizational performance. It established the importance; types; features and objectives of succession planning in the workplace. The paper juxtaposed replacement and succession planning in the workplace, established the development plan of replacement planning and examines how succession and replacement planning helps to improve on the performance of the organization. The paper identified that succession planning and replacement planning are two different strategies; succession planning is oriented around developing people through training, mentoring, coaching, while replacement planning is focused on meeting the demands of emergencies in the organization. The paper further identified that from the perspective of the workplace succession planning helps the organization to access the risk in key position, minimizes risk through appropriate compensation, recognition and management, and assuring the readiness of successors by identifying and training high potential employees. Replacement planning assumes a stable and unchanging organizational structure, which encourages silo-d thinking about talent since in most cases; replacements come from a specific specialty area. The paper concludes that these strategies are incredibly important to the lifeline of any organization as they both assists to improve organizational performance. The paper recommends that Organizations should make use of replacement planning and succession planning; together they can mitigate the risks of any organization going out of business.