Creating a succession plan for your organization can be a difficult and daunting task to complete. If you’re struggling to perfect a succession plan for your organization, check out these 7 Rules to Create a Successful Succession Plan.

If you already have a plan in the works, congratulations! Where do you go next? It’s important to continually implement and optimize your strategy. While succession planning can seem like a “set it and forget it” type of system, this is not the case! Creating a plan and putting the steps into practice are completely different obstacles. Now that your succession plan is created and ready to implement, let’s go over a few keys to getting the most out of your strategy.

Determine necessary skills

Determining the skills needed to fill certain upper-management positions should be a part of your succession planning strategy. However, it’s also important to continuously adapt and modify this aspect of the plan. While many core responsibilities of management positions won’t change, some require slight modification as time evolves.

Did you know only 54% of organization boards were grooming a specific successor, and 39% had no viable internal candidates who could immediately replace the CEO if needed? Knowing which skills to focus on when cultivating a prospect for any management position is crucial, and this will factor in to how successful the candidate may be.

Assess your current talent pool

The purpose of succession planning is to find suitable individuals to develop into future leaders of your organization. What better place to begin your search than within your own organization? Promoting leaders from within has a success rate of 70-80%. That success rates drops to 50-55% for external leadership hires. Developing leaders internally takes time and effort, but these candidates are more likely to be successful than external candidates.

Focusing on high-potential workers lets you channel more resources and coaching toward those employees with the greatest promise. The risk is that you overlook great people and alienate and frustrate the rest of the employees, which can impact morale and turnover.

Develop based on skill set and potential

Having done the groundwork of assessing your current talent, the ultimate goal is to get the right people with the right skills, knowledge and attributes into the right jobs at the right time. Therefore, an effective development process is still necessary to ensure equality of opportunity both for people within and outside of your current talent pool.

While some employees may require additional training and development, others might benefit from cross-departmental exposure and assignments. Work with the prospect to determine the appropriate course of action. The end result of taking the time to do this is that people will be promoted into high-level positions based on merit and whether or not they’re ready rather than length of employment or current job role.

Implement your company’s vision

This sort of insight indicates growth aspirations, who your target markets are and the types of services you’ll offer. All of which are critical as you think about how to develop (and deploy) your employees over the next few years.

Including potential successors in strategy conversations will help them acquire planning and leadership skills, as well as a broad vision of the organization and its objectives. The vision and mission clearly indicate the direction your company is heading. If you stress the importance of these items with potential leaders early on, it is likely they will adapt to the leadership role quickly.

Involve your entire organization in the succession plan

Considering 80% of CEO appointees have never served in a chief executive role before, your organization probably has executive level talent ready to be developed. Who better to mentor these prospects than the leaders currently filling these executive roles? Involving managers and leaders at all levels throughout the company is also an advantage because these individuals often know where the hidden talent lies within the organization.

Like any form of planning, the succession type isn’t all about predicting the future or even being prepared for it. Instead it is about creating a future that the organization wants and needs. The steps above are meant to be an outline for your organization to put your succession planning efforts into action. While there is no one size fits all to succession planning, these tips are sure to lead your organization into everlasting success.

This article originally published on the Inspire Software Blog.

About Drea Zigarmi:

Dr. Drea Zigarmi is a highly respected and experienced management consultant, best-selling author, powerful trainer, and motivational speaker.

Drea is the coauthor of Leadership and the One Minute Manager, the third book in Ken Blanchard’s best-selling One Minute Manager Library, and various chapters in Leading at a Higher Level. In addition, he has coauthored The Leader Within, Achieve Leadership Genius, and The Team Leader’s Idea-A-Day Guide. Drea has coauthored numerous Ken Blanchard Companies products, including the widely used Situational Leadership II, DISC, and Optimal Motivation programs.