May 2025 Volume 7

OPERATIONS & MANAGEMENT

Step 4: Assess Employee Competency (Part 2) The step above is rating how competent an employee is against their current position. However, if you’re doing succession planning, you’re not just looking to help them get better against their present job description. You’re also looking to see who might be best poised for the next level up. This step is essentially the same as the previous one, except you’re comparing the employee against the job description of the position they could potentially promote into. Use the same model and rate them with the labels above on each of the skills and competencies they would need to execute effectively to be successful at the next level. If most of the labels you’re using are Instruction, Guided Practice, and Mentoring, they’re probably not ready for the promotion. Either way, you’re getting a clear picture of where they need to develop After completing steps 3 and 4, you should have a clear idea of where the current developmental needs are most significant, both to be optimally successful in their current role and to be made ready for a potential next role. You will have a list of relative strengths (those skills and competencies rated as Delegation or Empowerment) and a list of areas that need to be developed. Armed with this information, it shouldn’t be difficult to create a development map for your employees that will help shore up areas of weakness. The beauty of the model above is that the rating you gave each skill and competency is also the first step in the development map. For example, if you felt like the employee had no previous experience with a skill, you would likely rate this person as Instruction. This means that they need to be taught the basics and moved through each of the subsequent steps on the model until they’re ready for Delegation. Each person should have a map to help move them to competence in each area of their job At this point, you have rated all your employees on their skills and competencies, and you should have a clear view of who needs the most ‘help’ to get ready for the next level and those who seem to be most prepared. If you have 9 employees who report to you, this rating system will allow you to rank-order these employees on how strong they are at their current job (Performance) and how ready they are for promotion (Potential). Using a 9-box Talent Matrix (see graphic), you can plot each of your employees onto the matrix to see who is most ready for their next move. People in the green boxes have good promotion potential. People in the blue boxes are solid workers but may need some help to develop their potential, and people in the red boxes aren’t very successful in their current role and likely have little promotion potential. Plotting your employees on this matrix gives a clear visual representation of the readiness of your people to promote. before they can be successful in the role. Step 5: Create a Development Map and perhaps prepare them for their next one. Step 6: Rank Employee Readiness

Step 7: Formalize the Succession List Once you’ve plotted your employees on the Talent Matrix, you’re just a small step from having your succession list. If you have people in the green boxes, those are the people at the top of your list, and it’s your job to determine how you want to rank them. If your best people are in the blue boxes, then someone probably isn’t immediately ready to step into the next role yet. You’ll either need to do some focused development or consider hiring from the outside until someone is developed enough to sit in the green boxes. One of the major issues organizations have here is that they haven’t done enough focused development with their people to get anyone into the green boxes, and they do one of two things: 1) Promote someone internally who isn’t ready and subsequently struggles in the new role or 2) Default to hiring people externally, which leaves people feeling like there are no promotion opportunities. In sum, the 9-box Talent Matrix helps you rank your employees on readiness for promotion, which helps you build your succession list efficiently and accurately. Step 8: Formalize Successor Development If you’ve made it this far in the process, you’ve developed good job descriptions and competencies that you then use to rate your employees against. This helps you develop a picture of where people need to grow to succeed in their current job and in the next one. You can then create a basic development map to improve your employees. Then you’ve used the 9-box Talent Matrix to rate your employees on readiness to promote (factoring in both performance and potential). This matrix makes it easier to rank your employees to determine your top candidates for promotion (which becomes your succession list). With this in place, it’s time to formalize the development of the top person (or people) on your list. This is a bit different than the development map we discussed earlier. The development map in step 5 might involve things like mentoring on a particular skill or showing them ‘behind the curtain’ on some decision-making processes, so they can broaden their view of the organization. This step, however, often involves formalized training to help build the more advanced competencies required for success at the next level. In addition, whereas everyone should be receiving the development map of step 5, this more formalized development is reserved for those at the top of the succession list. This is because of the time and monetary investment required to develop successors. Step 9: Post-Promotion Coaching No matter how much you prepare someone for a promotion, they’re going to run into situations that they haven’t dealt with before. In addition, it’s impossible to truly master a skill until you use it in real life. This means that a recently promoted employee often struggles at first, particularly if they’ve been promoted from amongst their peers and are now leading those former peers. While this employee could always come to their supervisor to help address the challenges of their new position, many don’t want to create the impression that they’re struggling. This leads

FIA MAGAZINE | MAY 2025 50