Help me study for my Management class. I’m stuck and don’t understand.
You post leads me to consider the process of succession planning. While it is common place to perform succession planning (generally using a 9 box exercise), most employers do so only for managerial levels on up. When I was in the ice cream manufacturing business, I had my leadership team focus on the exempt positions as is customary AND I had them focus on those hard-to-replace positions such as the blender operator (skilled at putting the formula together) and the homogenizer position. With both of these type of roles, if one left, we would need a great deal of time to ‘build’ a replacement and it would have a high probability of shutting down production.
However, succession planning is not an answer in and of itself. There needs to be individual development plans and a training strategy to complement the succession planning process. Most generally it goes along with what they call the ‘elbow’ which is the upper right green boxes shown below.
What do you think the biggest barriers are to management fully engaging in this type of process periodically to ensure sustainability of the operation?
