Succession Planning

Hire Quality works with many family businesses in the South / Central Ontario region and one of the topics we hear about that is taking up a lot of family and management time is - Succession Planning.

At its most effective, successful succession planning helps deliver what every family business strives for, placing the right people in the right place, at the right time, and often at the most difficult, unexpected or awkward moments, as the need for changing the guard at the top can often happen at any time.


Succession Planning is about successfully passing the torch

But for many businesses who aren't prepared, succession planning is a challenge, a big challenge for some, often because management functions have been siloed and unaccustomed to working closely together, and perhaps even more so, the true information expertise and knowledge about running the family business has not been shared or openly talked about.

To do it properly, succession planning needs time, HR support and a budget behind it.

Planning the Succession Plan

Succession Planning draws heavily upon career planning, HR and good management practices to help create an informed, relevant and realistic view of succession.

From the employee's point of view, succession needs to understand their goals, aspirations and preferences and therefore involves input from all relevant roles and levels of an organization, as well as the management team.

Succession planning is a long-term process, but many businesses rarely stay the same for very long.

And here's the real difficulty, by the time many succession plans have arrived at a solution, successors have already left, and the organization, positions and job structures all may have changed in the interim. Therefore, planning for constant change is a key part of the succession plan.

So how do you plan for constant change in succession planning?

Here are five tips, broadly acknowledged as best practices, for achieving your organization's succession-planning needs:

• Do not tie plans to a fixed organizational structure or position, make it fluid, as they will change over time
• Keep the management team and the employee base informed and up to date with whats happening - keep it transparent if you can, they will appreciate it, they will have input into the process and when the day comes, transition will be so much easier
• It can become part of your internal HR communications process where communicating vision and L-T planning is everything
• Succession planning fails when there is a lack of management support, so report on what matters to execs and do so frequently
• An open and agile organizational culture is far more likely to succeed than a culture that is rule driven and process focused.

These tips and good HR support and planning will help any organization big or small, better plan for succession.


Hire Quality partners with clients to build high performance teams by recruiting and selecting new talent and by upgrading current staff through training and development.  For more information go to www.hirequality.ca