Through the succession planning process, companies develop their employees’ knowledge, skills and abilities, and prepare them for advancement or promotion into evermore challenging roles in the organisation.

Actively pursuing succession planning ensures that employees are constantly developed to fill roles in the organisation. As the organisation expands or evolves, its succession planning guarantees that it has employees on hand, ready and waiting,  to fill the new roles.

Often, the management of organisations feel succession planning starts with the development of the skills of the employee but the Managing Director of Fidelity Bank, Mr Jim Baiden, speaking on the Springboard, Your Virtual University, a radio programme on Joy FM last Sunday, said succession planning must start with the recruitment policy of the organisation.

Speaking on the topic, ‘Succession planning, (Ideas and innovations as growth pillars)’, Mr Baiden pointed out that succession planning must start with recruitment of the right calibre of employees who have the potential and also suitable for succession planning programmes.

''The human capital base is that staff base that will transform your policies and strategy into actuals so recruiting the wrong people may spell doom for the organisation,” he stated.

“If your human capital base is weak and the scale set is found wanting, you would not be able to execute your strategies successfully and not be able to meet your target,” he added.

He said it was, therefore, critical for organisations to recruit from the right sources, groom them the right way, and prepare them continuously by getting them on their career paths successfully and “in due time, they will step up into higher roles and become executive managers ultimately.”

“Continuing it into the long term is very important because initially, you may have very good people who will make your company a market leader, but with time some staff will move on or retire and if you haven’t built the succession capacity of the company, you will be found wanting in the sense that you may not have people in the company who will step up into critical roles to continue the journey successfully and the performance of the company will drop,” he noted.

“If you are a market leader, you will like to maintain that position but if your human resource base is suspect, then the people that will run the show in the absence of the earlier ones will not have the same skill set that will deliver the number one position for you on the market,” he stressed.

Things to look out for when recruiting

Mr Baiden urged management of organisations to look out for people who have self-confidence and believe in their abilities.

He said organisations also have  to look out for people who speak up and make critical contributions that resolve issues.

“You may go into a meeting and there are maybe 10 heads of departments there discussing issues, analysing things and yet there would be just about two or three people who are voicing their opinions  all the time, who are putting out ideas and criticising things and putting forward solutions. These are the people to look out for when recruiting,” he said.

Common mistakes in recruiting

Mr Baiden also pointed out that, one of the decisions that lead to failure of leadership is the fact that when looking to appoint somebody as the leader, people look at longevity in the company.

“Longevity does not mean excellence and it does not mean efficiency. You could be there for a very long time and be very good because you have developed yourself,  but it is not a requirement for appointing somebody into a leadership position,” he mentioned.

“The other thing is familiarity because executives sometimes have their own friends in the company. In some companies, there are even remote relations but if you want to appoint somebody, you cannot appoint the person because he or she is a friend or a distant relation,” he stated.

Festival of ideas

This week’s edition of the Springboard was part of the build up to the ‘Festival of Ideas’ which is scheduled for August 17, 2017.

Sharing his experience on last year’s festival, Mr Baiden said the “this festival has come to stay; it has become one of the things that those of us in the corporate world look forward to annually.”

“I was privileged to be part of it last year and my topic was on mentoring, which is giving hope to the young ones and giving direction to them in order to step up and actualise their potentials,” he said.

“My engagement with them was very useful, very entertaining, very inspiring, as I led the discussions and got them to speak up and speaking up leads to confidence and for me as a managing Director of a bank, I give hope to my people,” he added.