Talent on Demand

Chapter 5 Appendix

Why Traditional Succession Planning No Longer Works

Many people think of the phrase “succession planning” as representing what talent management is all about. At a minimum, they see succession planning as equivalent to promotion from within or internal development of talent. In fact, succession planning refers to a specific subset of the general process of talent management: planning at the level of the individual worker and the individual job.

In its simplest form, succession planning is the process for identifying which individuals should advance to the next position in a hierarchy of jobs. When all talent was developed internally, employers would first map out the hierarchy of jobs—what we might think of as a job ladder—that ...