Communicate company commitment to employees by supporting Career Development

MENTORING More recently organizations have developed more formal mentoring relationships. While a number of organizations experimented with mentoring programs over the years, most notably in the 70's and 80's, they were primarily reserved for marginal and average performers as a tool for performance improvement. Due to the tumultuous events of the past decade, there has been an explosion of mentoring efforts in organizations of all sizes and industries. A survey conducted by Human Resource Executive last year found that the number of companies developing mentoring programs doubled, a percentage growth of 17% to 36%.

This renewed interest can be attributed to many factors, such as:

• Concern about employee morale and loyalty resulting from major restructuring and downsizing activities
• Increased sensitivity to the issues of women and minorities
• The need for succession planning
• Recruitment and retention issues
• Major change efforts which propel many organizations today
• The need for more and more skilled leaders

Regardless of the motivation, a growing number of organizations are finding mentoring and the sharing of intellectual capital to be making a profound impact on the individual and the organization.

MENTORING INTERVENTION We provide complete support to help you design your mentoring program based on the outcome you would like to achieve. We offer self-directed or formal mentoring programs designed to meet the needs of the mentor and protégé. We offer a complete step-by-step training guide to help the mentor, protégé, and program administrator to benefit from the mentoring process. We have an on-line mentoring system that supports the mentoring program. The system enrolls participants, matches mentors and protégé’s, assess needs, skills and competencies, offers feedback tools and reporting features, and allows the administrator to monitor progress.

WE OFFER THE FOLLOWING MENTORING RESOURCES

• Mentoring Administrative Support to set up a mentoring program
• Mentor and Protégé Training
• On-line assessments, tools, and training for Mentors and Protégés
• Developmental Planner — to help Mentor coach the Protégé
• Feedback Instruments — Assessment Tools to help Protégé receive feedback
• Evaluations — To monitor the mentoring relationships, progress and success of the program

MENTORING TRAINING WORKSHOP This is a highly interactive program designed to provide strategic “just in time” support to senior executives who wish to develop their skills in the areas of facilitation, mentoring and coaching. The program draws on the participant’s actual experience and current challenges in relation to their roles as facilitators, mentors and coaches to provide timely and practical tools, tips and techniques using a unique learning methodology.

OUTCOMES
By the end of this program each participant will have:

• Discovered their assumptions about mentoring and coaching
• Practiced coaching one-on-one and in teams
• Tried out new tools and techniques for coaching, facilitation, decision making, problem solving, meeting management, dialogue, reflection and learning
• Received feedback from colleagues and staff
• Discovered helpful questions to use while facilitating, coaching and mentoring
• Made progress on current coaching and mentoring challenges
• Identified coaching and mentoring opportunities
• Discovered mentor coach principles, frameworks and mindset
• Compiled lessons on mentor coaching from their collective experience
• Developed an action plan so that they can begin to apply what they’ve learned

SUCCESSION PLANNING The objective of succession planning is to ensure that employees are prepared to assume each critical leadership position in the event that it becomes vacant. In a competency based succession planning, competencies for each leadership position within the organization need to be identified. These competency profiles are then used to identify and rank employees with high potential for succeeding in each position with high potential for succeeding in each position.

When the competency profiles are prepared, the competencies are divided into two groups: competencies that are very difficult to develop, such as personal traits, and competencies that can be developed through on-the-job experience or learning activities. Employees within the organization who already possess the difficult-to-develop competencies are identified. Individual development plans are designed for each of these employees to assist them in developing the additional competencies they will need to fill the designated leadership positions.

There are five basic succession-planning components: Replacement Planning, Human Resource Audit, High Potential Employee Identification, Employment input, and Development Planning.

REPLACEMENT PLANNING Succession, or replacement planning entails identifying those employees who have the right skills to meet the challenges facing the organization. Replacement planning includes evaluating the quality and “readiness” of the named successors.

A useful tool for succession planning is the Succession Planning Work Sheet, which can be used by a manager to choose successors.

When conducting your replacement planning, follow these suggestions:

• Create a bottom-up approach — either specific positions or a pool for similar positions — whereby managers at lower levels make initial recommendations as to who can be replacements for direct reports.
• Have each higher level of management review the recommendations and make revisions. (If a cross-movement strategy is being used, managers should include recommendations from other parts of the organization.
• Use a technical ladder approach, to define succession planning and diagonal career opportunities for cross-functional opportunities throughout the organization.
• Identify competencies for all key positions in highly technical, detailed and stable organizations through a formal job analysis process.
• Managers, or a panel of managers, can evaluate individuals against these standards.
• Use group meetings in more flexible organizations to discuss replacement skill level, readiness, and potential to get a fairly accurate judgment of a person’s capability. Use group consensus for general skills for future use.

HUMAN RESOURCE AUDIT The human resource audit, builds on the identification of successors and addresses assessment of employee mobility to various positions. This process identifies whether employees at various levels should stay in their current positions, or move to other positions, and it also distinguishes key development strategies. A human resource audit helps designate the pools of people qualified for specific positions.

Each manager conducts a human resource audit by reviewing each direct report, including his or her:

• Time in current position
• Performance
• Readiness for advancement
• Potential to move to a new position
• Development required

This plan ensures that all employees are reviewed whether they are successors or not, alleviating management’s concern that succession planning is an elitist program that ignores the development of all employees.

Your performance management system and other programs that provide dependable employee skill and development information should support Succession Planning.

HIGH POTENTIAL EMPLOYEE IDENTIFICATION Experts recommend including a high-potential identification process for the next generation of leaders. These high potential can either be stand alone or incorporated into the entire succession planning process. The more comprehensive programs utilized by many successful groups generally integrate high-potential identification.

In addition, high potentials can even be grouped into pools of successors. A high potential is someone who has the ability to move into a particular level, such as a vice president or other key position in an organization. This definition becomes increasingly selective by identifying necessary competencies (based on previous or future success) and failure factors associated with certain positions.

EMPLOYEE INPUT Successful planning must respond to workforce demands, and this includes employee input. Such responsiveness is a vital link between human resource planning and business strategy. Employees list career interests, qualifications, and willingness to relocate on an employee input form. This form should trigger a career development discussion between manager and the employee.

DEVELOPMENT PLANNING One of the components of succession planning involves the design and implementation of career development programs for employees. As a result of the accelerated rate of change, development is becoming increasingly critical. Organizations need more skilled people faster to fill key positions. The skills needed for positions are changing so rapidly that people cannot keep up without having planned development. Many organizations use leadership development programs to fast track their high potentials. Some of the more innovative and effective programs use action learning where employees resolve actual business challenges while learning.

Unless development is a strong part of succession planning programs, the actual replacement will not be able to move into a designated position and high-potentials will not be prepared. Development takes succession planning from a plan to a process.

SUCCESSION PLANNING INTERVENTION We consult with you to help you develop your succession planning strategy and process. With our comprehensive on-line database, we select the tools you need to manage your succession plan. Typically, we identify critical competencies needed to meet the requirements of current and future leadership positions, then we assess the skills and competencies of potential successors. From this data, we create a gap to determine their development needs. A development plan is created for each potential successor. Successors readiness for succession is determined and their developmental activities monitored with the Succession Planning Database.