Succession planning has become increasingly important as a storm of trends continue to emerge in today’s business world. From mass layoffs, hybrid work and baby boomer retirements, there’s an even greater importance in ensuring your organization has the right people with the right skills ready to assume that next level of leadership.

However, there are three myths that continue to cloud the act of succession planning and can potentially limit your ability to ensure you have top talent where it’s needed most. This article will review three common misconceptions that learning and development (L&D) professionals have when it comes to succession planning.

3 Myths of Succession Planning

Myth No. 1 — Experience matters.

It’s easy to equivalate years of experience as the criteria for a promotion. However, experience without expertise means nothing. Insights can connect experience to expertise, and continuous learning is far more valuable than time spent in a specific role. Experience is often seen as the best indicator for successful performance and outcomes, however, eighty years of data presented by J.E. and R.F. Hunter in their article “Validity of Common Methods for Predicting Job Success,” show that experience is only the fifth best predictor of job success. Just because someone has experience in a certain role doesn’t mean they exhibit successful behaviors in it. There’s a huge difference between experience and behavior.

Myth No. 2 — Focus on the 9-box.

Historically, the 9-box matrix has been the default option for succession planning. The two axes include sustained performance (low, medium and high) and potential (low, medium and high) and can quickly facilitate conversation by categorizing individuals into the appropriate boxes based on how they meet the criteria. There are a number of benefits for using it including its simplicity and visual nature. However, it’s important to move beyond the 9-box in order to take both a more macro and granular look at people’s ability to contribute to the organization moving forward.

Here are five steps to taking a deeper dive in succession planning:

1. Identify the key roles to be filled, the incumbents, potential successors and target dates for advancement.
2. Assess the role today and in three years based on areas such as knowledge, skills, capabilities, success metrics and other key areas. Too often, we evaluate people for succession based on yesterday’s criteria, not the future they’ll be working in.
3. Conduct an assessment to identify the skills and capabilities needed for the role. These capabilities for success should be customized to the role and may include items such as industry expertise, setting strategic direction, emotional intelligence, decision making, executive presence, etc. These capabilities can be inputted into an Excel spreadsheet and weighted with the following scale: 3 = highly important; 2 = moderately important; 1 = important. After each skill and capability is weighted, the employee is rated on a scale of 0-3, with 3 being excellent; 2 being above average; 1being average; and 0 being below average. For each factor, the weighted “x” rating equals the score. Individual factor scores can then be totaled for a cumulative score. The total score can be used for one person to compare with their scores at future dates or it can be used in comparison with other candidates for the role.
4. Conduct a qualitative comparison and assess each candidate in areas such as competencies (areas of expertise), capabilities (skills and activities), performance from relevant experiences, existing skills gaps and areas for development.
5. Create a recommendation plan that includes the roles, specific recommendations for each role, rationale behind the recommendations, target date for changes and next steps.

Myth No. 3 — Put low performers on a plan.

Research by professor Will Felps of the University of New South Wales in Australia showed that groups with one underperformer did worse than other teams by 30-40%. Worse yet, the behavior of the underperformer was adopted by other group members despite the fact they were only together for about one hour. In my work guiding executives through succession planning, they use a scorecard to assess their key employees on a monthly basis. A scorecard helps leaders measure employee performance and their impact on the organization. This approach can give leaders a comprehensive evaluation of their team’s performance, and offer them a way to influence behavior changes.

Conclusion

Remember the core of “succession” is about achieving success, not mediocrity. It’s time to transform succession planning from a process rooted in the status quo to one that uses dynamic insights to elevate your organization’s overall talent level. Start by shattering the myths around experience, the 9-Box and underperformance to move the organization to assess the real value people are contributing. Shelve the usual check-the-box approach to succession planning and instead infuse it with a strategic approach to raise the collective bar of performance in your organization.