Senior leaders worldwide are set to retire in droves, prompting what some call an impending “human capital time bomb.”
Luckily, organisations can implement workforce management strategies and a succession plan to prevent such a bomb from exploding.
This can be done through a five-step process, which includes:
- Identifying the best leadership style for your organisation. This should take culture into account, since one of the primary reasons that CEOs fail is due to poor organisational fit. Recommended assessments to overcome this include psychological and behavioral evaluation, as well as an in-depth look at what type of leadership the company’s culture requires.
- Weighing the costs and benefits of hiring internally versus externally. While it’s tempting to look outside the organisation, research indicates that leaders who have been developed inside the organisation reaches productivity 50% faster than external applicants.
- Evaluating leadership gaps, and striving to develop workers when projected skills gaps appear.
- Developing succession plans for every level of the organisation, which may include backfilling data from recruitment and performance reviews, maintaining a shortlist of possible candidates for replacement, and creating talent profiles to be compared side by side
- Implementing recognition programs that acknowledge when employees and leaders exhibit goal-oriented thinking
With these policies in place, organisations can enjoy a stable and productive workforce for years to come.
