6 Questions with Doris Sims, Author and Succession Planning Expert

About Doris

Doris M. Sims, SPHR is the Founder and President of Succession Builders, LLC, a talent management and succession planning consulting firm. Her experience in organizational and leadership development spans over 20 years.

Doris has directed succession management and leadership development programs in Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies such as Alcatel, First Horizon Home Loans, and CVS/Caremark. She received her Master’s degree in Human Resource Development from Indiana State University.

In addition to her current book, The 30-Minute Guide to Talent and Succession Management: A Quick Reference Guide for Business Leaders, Doris is the co-author of Building Tomorrow’s Talent: A Practitioner’s Guide to Talent Management and Succession Planning. She is also the author of the McGraw-Hill book Creative New Employee Orientation Programs, and has contributed articles to many other books and multiple periodicals, including Training Magazine, Talent Management Magazine, and The Consultant’s Toolkit.

6 Questions

Q: Let's start with a question that is on the mind of many people. In this down economy, is it more important or less important to focus on succession? And why?

Doris: While it is important for every company to focus on cash flow and profitability right now, it is also important to continue to plan for the future so we are not caught off guard as the stock market becomes healthier and suddenly Baby Boomers decide they can retire after all. Succession Planning is as much about what is happening today as it is preparing for 2-3 years down the road. If we stop identifying talent and preparing emerging leaders and executives for the future, it will be too late to develop leaders in time. We certainly wouldn't stop spending time and money identifying and developing new products, new markets and new customers in this economy...why would we stop identifying and developing our own talent?

Q: In your opinion, what is the biggest obstacle companies face in implementing a good succession planning process?

Doris: The biggest obstacle is the level of understanding of what talent management really is(there is a lot of confusion going on) and how it can achieve a return-on-investment for both the company and employees. It is pretty amazing that most companies will spend many thousands of dollars on external recruiting fees, and they may employ several full-time and contract recruiters, but having even one full-time internal Talent Management professional is still pretty rare. Talent Management pertains to the onboarding, assessment, development and career movement of talent within an organization.

Q: What is the biggest benefit of implementing such a process?

Doris: An ROI can be pretty quickly achieved by increasing internal fill of open leadership positions and reducing external recruiting costs and fees. In addition, talent management processes serve to retain talented employees as they see more internal career path opportunities, and talent management decreases the "time-to-fill" time period of leadership position vacancies. Under the Talent Management Umbrella, we find activities such as succession planning, high potential identification and development, Talent Review meetings, performance management and leadership development. Even if you can eliminate the need to pay for just 1-2 senior level external recruiting fees annually, you have saved enough to pay for a full time talent management professional.

Q: In the book, Building Tommorrow's Talent, you talk about whether or not to notify high potentials that have been identified as such. You recommend a notification approach that is the best match for an organization's culture and readiness stage for leadership development. Are there clues that tell you whether your company is mature enough and can handle an open notification process?

Doris: Any company is ready for an open notification process if the communication of high potentials is handled well. The key is to manage expectations right from the start. For example, when you notify high potentials that they have been identified for participation in a leadership development program, they should know what is expected of them, and what they can expect from the company. They should know that they will be in the program for a specific period of time (or that they will need to be re-identified for the program each year), and at some point they will move out of the program and others will move into the program. Being identified as a high potential is not a "stamp on the forehead for life", but it is a point in time identification of employees who are ready and willing to take on additional development and career assignments. Most companies also "brand" their high potential program with a specific leadership program name, rather than using the term "high potential employees". The advantages of notifying high potentials is the retention of these key employees, as well as greatly increasing the ability to develop the high potentials, and to measure the results of the program.

Q: How important is executive support, and can you be successful without it?

Doris: Having executive and board support of your Talent Review and Succession Management processes greatly increases accountability, cross-functional career movement of high potentials, funding and resources of these strategies. There is no doubt that executive support is very important to the success of your talent management strategy. However, if you don't have this level of support from the start, you can initiate a somewhat "grass roots" effort by partnering with one or a few business leader champions in the company, implementing talent management processes in their functional areas, showing a return-on-investment, and then growing the programs once others see the business value of these processes.

Q: Finally, what's on the horizon for succession planning and talent management?

Doris: A great question - it is actually very interesting watching talent and succession management expanding and evolving as a human resource function, and it will be especially interesting watching how this historic economic time period will affect succession planning. It may cause the Baby Boomers to leave the workforce in a more concentrated manner, once their 401(k) and stock options expand again to the point that they can suddenly retire, and it will be important to be prepared for this exodus. More companies will continue to implement talent management processes and systems for the first time, and I believe that talent management will expand to become a "standard" human resource function in all mid to large sized organizations.

You can contact Doris at:

doris@successionbuilders.com


Links to Books by Doris Sims

The 30-Minute Guide to Talent and Succession Management: A Quick Reference Guide for Business Leaders

Building Tomorrow’s Talent: A Practitioner’s Guide to Talent Management and Succession Planning

Creative New Employee Orientation Programs

Resolve Conflicts to Keep Employees Engaged and Productive

“Those in conflict are unable to sustain a productive and stable exchange,” according to Craig Rashkis, a mediator who has a master’s degree in dispute resolution from Pepperdine University’s Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution.

In his article Workplace Conflict and the Importance of Resolving Early, he writes that the entire amount of organization resources spent on resolving workplace conflict early on is typically less than the resources used up in just a half a day of trial when defending a lawsuit. Perhaps more importantly, Rashkis defines benefits which include:

• Increased morale and productivity
• Greater employee loyalty
• Greater retention
• Clarification of organizational purpose and policy
• Increased profitability
• Better reputation
• Success through superior products and services

A New Leadership Point of View

Conflict is not always easy to identify and must be distinguished from disagreements which can be a part of enthusiastic discussion or caring for the situation at hand. Conflict is associated with anger and frustration.

Effective leaders work from a viewpoint that keeps diverse work teams centered and successful. They know how to use courage and resolve to achieve goals and work with others. It’s fairly shocking that according to research of 840,000 employees from the U.S. and U.K., 43% of employees report being disengaged on the job by their third year of employment because they become discouraged or dissatisfied in some way. Conflict in the workplace can only add to this and further disengage employees.

When leaders start to identify and then deal with situations that seem to cause conflict, issues can be resolved fairly and effectively.

Diverse Personalities and Work Styles at the table

There has been much reported about the new and growing diversity in the workforce. As this continues to be a factor, leaders need to be trained to recognize that personality traits and ego can largely influence the initiation of conflict.

Being aware of this and having the right skills to recognize and deal with conflict quickly and effectively will address the root cause, rather than getting bogged down in inflammatory outbursts, irrational eruptions, and inappropriate behavior. Without early resolve, this can become a continual cycle leading to the disengagement-- that we’ve already defined-- and broken commitment to individual performance.

By using effective techniques in communication and management, leaders help team members understand other points of view in order to move beyond the conflict.

Keeping Them Engaged and Sustained

Your organization can impact a more positive bottom line characterized by productivity and profitability by improving morale and creating more functional and engaged employees. As Rashkis indicates, “The single most important benefit of resolving workplace conflict early is avoiding its debilitating and potentially disastrous effects.”


Take this simple quiz to find out if your leaders have the right point of view to deal with conflict. My managers and team leaders. . .

1. accept conflict as inevitable in all work situations and deal with it in order to maintain focus and productivity.
Yes
No
2. recognize the positive and negative impacts of conflicts and leverage situations to everyone’s advantage.
Yes
No
3. distinguish between the two sources of conflict so that the situation can be resolved fairly and effectively.
Yes
No
4. establish a cooperative atmosphere to resolve conflicts when they arise.
Yes
No

If you answered any of these with a “No”, it is likely that your organization needs some work in this area create a more engaged and sustained workforce in productivity and loyalty to your organization.


Skywalk Group can help! Click here to find out about our Resolving Conflict training program.

Contact Mindy Seiffert for more information, or to find out how to implement this and other programs in your organization.

Taking Behavioral Interviewing to the Next Level

The behavioral interview has been in use since the 1970s. Most companies use at least some form of the behavioral interview process as they try to find candidates to fill positions. This is a very effective practice, that if done correctly, can identify the best candidate for the job. After all, the old saying, "behavior predicts", is true. Having said that, there is a flaw in the behavioral interview. The interview will only give you the best information, if you have done a thorough job of describing the behavior you are looking for.

An Example

John is interviewing for a position with the ABC company. ABC has developed a competency model and one of the core competencies identified is customer service. In fact, John is interviewing for a customer service position. This makes that competency even more critical. The ABC interviewer follows the behavioral interview approach, and asks John to describe a time when he has provided excellent customer service to a particular client. John tells a story about the time he had a client that called in to complain about a problem she was having with a product. John spent over an hour on the phone with the client and finally identified what the root cause of the problem was and helped to resolve the situation. John was offered the job, but subsequently fired within 6 months of starting. Why? It turns out, John was willing to spend hours on many client calls, trying to resolve every detail of every situation. What ABC needed was someone to "quickly" identify the situation and pass it off to the appropriate person. Both are considered customer service, but the latter was what ABC really needed. The lack of clarification cost ABC the expense of hiring the wrong person. It also cost John his job.

A Different Approach

Competencies are necessary, and a valuable part of understanding how an organization operates. Alone though, they are not enough to determine the criteria for job success. That is why when we help our clients profile a job, prior to hiring, we go to the level of job activity. By utilizing a Job Analysis Consulting Tool (JACT), we can get the to "critical few" activities that are required for a person to be successful in the position. Consider the following activities:

1. Does whatever is necessary to accomplish goals
2. Works cooperatively to achieve objectives.

Both are activities that point to broad competency family of "getting results', or "results orientation", but each is a very different way of approaching that job. Your determination of which is really required, can mean the difference between between a successful hire, and one that struggles to fit in to your culture.

For more about the JACT process, check out our website here