Succession planning is a challenging endeavor.

When done well, it can reap myriad benefits—often determining whether organizations thrive and grow in today’s complex business environment. Our comprehensive approach to succession planning helps our clients focus on what counts at each part of the process, from targeting the right competencies to assessing the program’s impact. Beyond that, our deep expertise in competency modeling, gap analysis, individual assessment, and leadership development coupled with our collaborative and nimble approach to working with our clients helps ensure that they have the right people in the right place at the right time.

We help our clients know where to focus by identifying the competencies that today’s employees need to address tomorrow’s challenges. From the FBI to Fortune 500 companies, we’ve helped our clients identify mission-critical competencies, along with career paths and developmental experiences that foster the growth of those competencies. We can work with your existing competency model, expanding it, as needed, to include emerging competencies, or help you develop a new model.

Once organizations know where to focus, they need a way to gauge bench strength on mission-critical competencies and determine where to expend development resources. Competency-based assessments provide a data-based foundation for such decisions. For example, assessment scores can provide an objective basis for populating a 9-box on both the performance and the potential dimensions. Competency-based assessments can also identify specific development needs among high potentials. When aggregated, assessment scores can be used to identify bench strength and competency gaps within and across business units. HumRRO has a 60+ year history of creating custom assessment tools using many different approaches; our interactive simulations, such as virtual role plays, provide a cost-effective, engaging way to identify high potentials and tailor development opportunities to their strengths and areas for improvement.

From 360° feedback to coaching to rich media simulations, we have worked with our clients to design and implement leadership development programs that stimulate growth and help participants profit from the lessons of experience. We recently authored Leadership Development: Growing Talent Strategically, a white paper being distributed by SIOP and SHRM (https://www.humrro.org/SIOP-SHRMLeader-dev). We have also helped organizations link employee engagement with outcome metrics such as turnover, then apply sophisticated statistical techniques to identify engagement factors with the strongest impact on key outcome metrics. To the extent that high potential employees can be identified within human capital data sets, the same techniques can be used to identify drivers of engagement and retention for this critical employee group.

With the right data, organizations can model the impact of various factors on talent pools, and how talent pools may need to shift under hypothesized future scenarios. Forecasting can help identify potential competency gaps or projected leadership levels on diversity and inclusion metrics. The first challenge is often locating and linking the necessary data systems. We have decades of experience making sense of messy and complex data structures. After data preparation, we use cutting edge statistical modeling to help our clients understand and predict factors that drive key outcomes such as turnover and engagement. This information
can be used to dynamically adjust succession plans, and to provide data-based information about how to keep high potential employees engaged and willing to remain with the organization.

Decision-makers need evidence to evaluate the effectiveness and impact of succession planning efforts. The starting point, of course, is to define what the
impact should be and the metrics that will be used to determine if expectations have been met. HumRRO has conducted rigorous, comprehensive evaluations of many different types of human capital programs for over half a century. We know how to help our clients ask the right evaluation questions, focus on the right metrics and collect truly informative data, and assess the impact of succession planning across the organization.

Putting the right people in the right place at the right time.

A simple proposition, but one that many organizations struggle to put into practice. One key reason is that effective succession planning requires expertise in so many diverse areas. Through our competency modeling, talent assessment and forecasting, leadership development, and evaluation work, HumRRO offers a rare constellation of skills uniquely suited to the succession planning arena. Ensuring strong, diverse talent pools across an organization’s leadership and technical ranks is never going to be an easy, straightforward process. By following the integrative approach laid out above, HumRRO helps our clients navigate these challenging waters and create a flexible, integrative, and forward-looking succession planning program.