This is What You Need to Know About How Succession Planning Works

Sometimes the biggest decisions about your career are made when you’re not in the room.

Perhaps you have overheard leaders lament about the intense preparation required for these meetings or noticed a palpably anxious buzz around the office on the day-of. Often called ‘succession planning meetings’ or ‘talent reviews,’ these meetings are a key element of any robust talent management strategy.

Leadership teams use succession planning to identify who the future leaders of the organization will be and what further coaching or development is needed to prepare those employees for the opportunities that lie ahead.

What happens during succession planning is a mystery to most individual contributors. After all, you won’t be invited to attend unless and until you manage a team of people. Even then, it’s usually only the top tiers of leadership and their HR partners that are invited into the fold.

But if you aspire to leadership at your current company, then it’s incumbent upon you to understand what exactly is being discussed during these meetings so that you can ensure the conversations being had about you behind closed doors are moving you closer to where you want to go.

As an HR leader, I have sat in on dozens of succession planning meetings at multiple companies, and I can confirm that the most important decisions about your career are often being made when you’re not in the room.

These are the 4 key things that leaders discuss in succession planning meetings and how you can proactively influence meeting outcomes.

Past performance

In succession planning, a 9-box grid is used to evaluate and organize employees into 9 distinct talent categories using a 3x3 matrix based on performance and potential.

Depending on where you are ranked related to performance and potential, you will be plotted into one of these 9-boxes which should then determine what kind of developmental or corrective measures your boss provides you with next.

The x-axis on the grid measures ‘past performance,’ and is typically organized either by ‘low/medium/high performance’ or ‘does not meet expectations/meets expectations/exceeds expectations.’ This rating is typically determined based on your prior 2 years of performance. If you’re new to the organization they will either use your tenure thus far or may designate you as ‘too new to rate.’

If you’re one of those people who is always complaining that your boss “doesn’t have a clue what — or how much — I do,” then you’re in trouble. Why? Because your manager will need to give specific examples of your work or abilities to justify why they have rated your performance the way they did.

This is just one reason why it’s so important that your boss remains aware of what you’re working on and what results that work is driving at all times.

Take time during your weekly check-in meetings to proactively update your boss on your work even if you’re not being asked to do so. Outline the situations you are facing, the role you are taking on projects, and the impact you are making on the business as a result.

In short, treat your check-ins as pseudo-interviews by using them to showcase how you are performing so that when succession planning rolls around, there is no question in your boss’s mind about what you’re up to and whether or not you are effective.

Future potential

The y-axis of the 9-box measures ‘future potential,’ and is typically organized either by ‘low/medium/high potential’ or ‘low potential for advancement/potential to advance one level/potential to advance 2 or more levels’ over the next 12–18 months.

To justify where your manager has rated your potential, they will need to provide specific examples of when they have observed your potential in action. These might be times when they observed you demonstrating things like executive presence, critical thinking, or leadership aptitude in a way that was above the expectations of your pay grade and more in line with what is expected from someone at a higher level.

If you haven’t already realized it, every moment you spend at work is an interview for what comes next. Your colleagues are constantly taking in cues about you based on how you behave each day and are then using those data points to evaluate your likelihood to succeed at the next level.

But your boss can’t possibly observe you all day every day, which is why it’s so important to get intentional about using your one-on-one time together to share those events.

If you view your check-ins as a formality that happens every week but isn’t particularly impactful for you, then you’re doing it all wrong. Just because you don’t experience the immediate gratification of their impact doesn’t mean there isn’t a long-term career benefit to these if you make the most out of them.

Use this time to slow down and share in detail what you’re working on, why you’re working on it, what obstacles you have encountered, the pros and cons you’ve evaluated along the way, the outcomes you’ve accomplished, and what you learned throughout the process.

Let me be clear, most leaders will not directly ask you for this information every week. Instead, it’s your responsibility to proactively offer your boss this window into your critical thinking and problem-solving processes. In turn, this helps them to recognize when you are thinking like a leader and thus ready for a new challenge.

Career preferences

Inevitably, someone around the table — usually HR — will ask the question, “what does [insert your name] want to do next?”

While this is absolutely the right question to be asking, you’d be surprised how many managers don’t think to ask their employees what they want out of their careers or where they want to go next. They either assume that you want whatever job has been designated next on the organization’s standard career path, or they haven’t stopped to consider your preferences at all.

If you’re thinking, “Wait — How can a leader effectively develop an employee for what comes next if they haven’t even asked the employee what he/she wants that next step to be?” then you’re on the right track and you’ll make a great leader one day.

In any event, you must make your career preferences known to your boss whether you’re being asked to share them or not. And not just once or twice, “because the single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it's taken place.”

Make sure your boss knows what you want to do, what job you want next, and what job you don’t want ever. If they don’t understand where you want to take your career, then they will not be able to effectively advocate for you in talent reviews. Further, you may end up being pushed towards a career path that doesn’t interest you.

Perceptions about you

We’ve talked a lot about your boss’s perceptions of your performance, potential, and career preferences. But, your boss and HR are not the only people in the room during succession planning. Not by a long-shot.

Depending on where you fall in the organizational hierarchy, your boss’s boss, your boss’s boss’s boss, and so on will also be in the room. In some cases, the bosses of your peers are also in the room. So, why does this matter?

Succession planning meetings are much more like roundtable discussions than they are lectures. Everyone in the meeting is invited and expected to share their perceptions and interactions with the talent being plotted on the 9-box.

So, imagine this. Your boss and her boss think you are an outstanding performer with high potential to become a Director in the next year. All of the feedback so far has been overwhelmingly positive, and your VP is about ready to recommend a promotion at review time.

But then, another leader speaks up with a very different opinion.

Someone on his team (your peer) who works closely with you has had pretty negative things to say about your collaboration — or lack thereof. Suddenly, it becomes clear to everyone in the room that while you’ve built a strong reputation within your team, you may have done so at the expense of maintaining strong partnerships across teams.

Do you think this would be a big red flag for someone on track to be a Director? Yep, it sure would be.

All of this is to say that we often overlook our relationships with our peers. Our boss writes our review, and her boss signs off on it, so why should we care what anyone else thinks about their daily interactions with us, right? Wrong.

When it comes to succession planning, everyone in the room has an opinion, and they all matter. Perhaps some matter more than others, but everyone’s voice is cumulatively taken into consideration. And if it becomes evident that the way peers experience you at work differs significantly from the way your boss does, you will find yourself at a career dead-end.

Treat everyone at work like they have a say in your next promotion because, in some ways, they do.

If your company has a well-established succession planning process as part of their talent management strategy, then that is great news. Why?

Because leadership is already regularly discussing talent and formalizing a plan to move employees up into leadership positions from within rather than hiring from the outside.

By being mindful about your actions and transparent about your career goals, a well-defined succession planning process can help you get where you want to go.

And, someday, you might even find yourself doing the plotting.

Not a member of Medium yet?

Join here to directly support my work and get access to every story on Medium. You can also subscribe to my free newsletter or connect with me on Linkedin.