This is the third and last post in the series discussing the value of Learning Management Solutions as part of an integrated Talent Management strategy.  In the previous two posts we covered the Recruiting, Onboarding, and Learning connection and the Performance Management, Goal Planning, and Learning connection.  In this post, we’re going to tackle Succession Planning and Learning.

Succession is an interesting process unto itself, even absent any connection with Learning (well summarized I think by the cartoon to the right by Hugh MacLeod).  Some aspects of succession look a lot like recruiting, particularly the parts that involve evaluating talent for fit in a given role and creating sufficient pipeline of capable candidates for potential openings.  Other parts of succession look a lot like performance, goal planning and development, particularly those parts that involve development plans, mentoring, and work rotation assignments designed to impart new skills in support of a future role.  Accordingly, many of the previously discussed learning value props and benefits apply to succession as well.

Identifying Talent and Growing Talent Pools

One of the central challenges with recruiting is having enough of the right people in a given succession pool.  Learning provides a critical set of features to help with this process:

• As part of your Talent Intelligence strategy to know your people, a learning solution can provide new insights and data points to make better decisions about possible successors for a given role.  An employee’s training history, certifications, and contributions within social channels for example, provide a new set of data for analysis and determination of “fit.”
   
• Another area where learning solutions can provide insight is in the identification of lifelong learners.  As Peter Senge noted in The Fifth Discipline, organizations must embrace continuous learning as a cultural norm in order to survive and thrive amid an ever more rapidly changing business environment.  A slew of research has proved this connection by finding business impact correlations between learning and development among senior leaders and company performance. By tracking self-initiated training and development opportunities, learning solutions can help identify those individuals with a learning mindset.
   
• Learning solutions can also provide mechanisms to increase the pool of possible successors.  Gone are the days of the single “perfect” successor; smart companies have realized that it’s a lot more sustainable and effective to create succession pools with multiple candidates.  Variations and diversity within a good-sized succession pool insulate organizational continuity from changing business conditions and competitive pressures.  Learning and training solutions provide the tools to develop marginal candidates, who may have great promise but for some specific knowledge, competency or experience gaps, into viable successors, thereby increasing the depth and width of particular talent pools.
   

Leadership Training and Development of Critical Talent Pools

Of course, the obvious relationship between learning and succession is leadership development.  Modern learning management systems provide the necessary foundational elements to support sophisticated leadership development whether primarily classroom-based, web-based, or some interesting combination of the two.  Modern LMS solutions even include social features that enable future leaders to network with each other between “formal” learning events, helping them to strengthen their organizational network.

While it’s easy to assume that these structured leadership programs are the mainstay of succession-related learning curriculum, many innovative companies are also using structured programs to support the development of talent in other critical talent pools. Within certain industries, core skills shortages may even trump leadership challenges.  Designing structured curriculum to grow senior petroleum engineers at an oil and gas company or dialysis nurses at a long-term care facility may be even more critical to long-term success than growing more leaders.

Summary

Over the past three posts, we’ve laid out some of the more obvious ways that learning improves and actualizes the business impacts promised in related talent management pillars.  We’ve shown how learning solutions can turn the theoretical aspects of talent management practices into actionable talent enablement and engagement.  Long gone are the days when Learning Management Solutions were viewed as something “outside” Talent Management.  Modern organizations need to embrace learning solutions not just as a pillar within their Talent Management suite, but as a key catalyst in realizing value and business impact from these related pillars.
 

Related Posts

Learning and Talent Management: Recruiting
Learning and Talent Management: Performance Management and Goal Planning
Talent Management, Learning Management Systems, and Social Learning
Building a Sustainable Leadership Pipeline
In Succession