The Future of Career Pathing and Succession Planning

Having a strong plan in place for when key employees leave is makes your organization more prepared for change. This is called a succession plan, which helps businesses identify and develop talented employees who can step into important roles—you know, if someone unexpectedly wins the lottery.

The Predictive Index^® (PI) is a tool that helps with career planning and succession. This tool measures a person’s behavioral work styles and learning agility to better understand their strengths and to see if they would be a good fit for different jobs. Let’s jump into how you can use PI to build an effective succession strategy and career plan.

Using Predictive Index for Career Planning and Succession

Okay, you read the headline, let’s get to it. Here’s how leaders can use PI to help with career planning and succession:

1. Find talented employees: PI helps identify employees with the behaviors and qualities needed for leadership roles. This information helps you zero in on those employees that match the organization’s future talent needs and create personalized career paths based on performance leadership capability. No need to break out the horoscopes, now you have accurate data on what behavior is leading your employees to success.
2. Match employees with the right jobs: PI matches employees with jobs that suit their behavioral strengths and learning style, leading to more engaged and more motivated employees (and who doesn’t want that?). You’ll also be able to identify gaps between an employee’s natural strengths and their current role (or the next level up role they are being considered for).
3. Give feedback: PI provides feedback on strengths and weaknesses, helping identify development opportunities or areas to skill-up. And, no, we’re not talking about those generic AI-generated feedback reports. PI uses a scientifically-validate method to create a common language around workplace behavior that makes giving feedback or recognition simpler.
4. Encourage continuous learning: Foster a culture of learning by sharing PI results. Through understanding their own behavioral style and learning agility, employees can be more proactive in taking on new challenges and developing new skills. 

Common Challenges with Career Pathing 

Alright, we know it’s not as simple as waiving a magic wand. There are challenges to building good career paths:

• Limited resources: Many organizations can’t afford to offer extensive career development programs and don’t have the right resources in place to invest in their people.
• Lack of time: Leaders often don’t have enough time to provide one-on-one career coaching to their employees.
• Lack of data: Leaders may not have enough information to make informed decisions about career development. The solution? Scientifically-backed strengths assessments combined with a clear picture of what behaviors are required for each of your positions.

Strategies to Improve Succession Planning

Despite these challenges, there are a number of strategies that leaders can use to achieve holistic succession planning, including:

1. Identify those high potential employees that will benefit the organization most from career development and preparation for future succession roles. Yes, pick on your A+ players.
2. Invest in focused career development programs for those specific employees. Businesses should invest in programs that help targeted employees learn new skills and explore different career options. 
3. Provide individual career coaching as part of a leader’s regularly scheduled check-ins or one-on-ones with their employees. Leaders should offer personal coaching to help employees identify strengths, mitigate weaknesses, and set goals. If coaching is a regularly scheduled process, it will be prioritized over other time-consuming activities. No longer, will you fall into the trap of “too busy” for development.
4. Collect data. Leaders should use tools like PI to gather information about employee abilities and strengths.  These data points can be combined with what the leader observes and learns about the employee’s skills, abilities, and interests to help make better decisions about career development and succession planning.

Benefits of Formal Planning

Have we convinced you, yet? A solid succession plan offers several benefits:

• Preparing for the future: A good succession plan will leave an organization prepared for both planned and unplanned turnover in key roles. 
• Retaining employees: When employees have clear career paths and opportunities to grow, they are more likely to stay with the company.
• Increasing productivity: Engaged employees who see progress in their careers tend to be more engaged and more productive.
• Retaining customers: Customers prefer doing business with companies known for developing and keeping talented employees.

In Summary

The Predictive Index is a helpful tool for leaders looking to build strong career paths and promote a culture of learning. PI helps identify talented employees, match them with suitable roles, provide feedback, and encourage growth. These strategies lead to benefits like employee retention, talent and succession planning, higher productivity, and happier customers. MindWire can show you how PI helps design a standard of excellence for your key roles, identifies high-potential employees, and matches employees with suitable future roles.