Succession Planning

Felix, Maria Eunice G.

01-54265

Management 209

Prof. Ariel Ortilla

April 27, 2010

REACTION PAPER: SUCCESSION PLANNING

As the seminar conductors pointed out, Succession Planning is the systematic approach to ensure leadership continuity. It involves creating a talent pool where you draw your candidates “to groom”. Also, it necessitates measuring potential successors’ strengths and developing them in ways that best fit these strengths. After finding out their potential, you list them according to willingness and readiness to take on the job. This is then the pool where you take talent from in case the need for a successor on the vacant critical position arises. It was also noted that even low level positions can be critical like in cases of company programmers and relationship officers of banks or insurance enterprises.

This is true especially in the case of programmers who are the ones who pioneered the creation of the company program. It would not be easy to teach the same knowledge and familiarity a certain programmer has to say, a rookie programmer. With relationship officers of banks and insurances, the nature of their job requires maintenance of relationships with account holders; such that, in case a relationship officer leaves he leaves together with the portfolio of accounts he has acquired for the company.

If you’ll ask me for an example of succession planning, I’ll cite the Chinese families as the perfect illustration. Why not? Even if it does not contain all those complexities as stated in the seminar last Saturday, they do exemplify the steps necessary to create succession planning. Although the candidates that are groomed for succession are limited to their children, nevertheless they undergo a long process before they inherit the position or the family business.

For example, Formal Development is attained by exposing their children in the daily work, this way the children become familiarized with the...