One critical step in building a robust succession plan is identifying the key roles within your organization that should be part of the succession planning process. This involves determining which positions are critical and specialized—both core and non-core—relative to your organization’s success.
The Critical Roles Assessor is designed to assist both for-profit and non-profit organizations in identifying these key roles. It helps guide investments in succession programs, strategy and target cascades, training, and attracting high-potential talent from the market.
Additionally, it enables organizations to differentiate compensation for these roles and plan for succession through various approaches, such as building internal talent, buying external expertise, redeployment, binding key roles, or leveraging temporary solutions. The process also identifies roles that require unique skills or knowledge.
The Critical Role Assessors are designed to help leaders identify critical roles within their organization. Below are a few tips on how to effectively use the Critical Role Identification Assessors:
The Critical Role Identification Assessors can be used by any practitioner within the human resources function, including executives, managers, and team leaders. When identifying critical roles in isolation, the organizational hierarchy often influences the decision-making process, with managers selecting roles they deem important among individuals reporting to them.
However, decisions about which roles are critical, specialized, core, or non-core for effective succession planning need to be made more holistically. To ensure a comprehensive approach, we recommend that organizations establish a Succession Advisory Team (SAT) responsible for championing the succession planning process.
Use the Role Criticality Assessor to identify all key roles within your company that the Succession Advisory Team believes are important to operations. While your C-suite leaders and senior managers may immediately come to mind, taking an enterprise-wide approach and considering roles across the entire organization is crucial.
It’s better to be exhaustive in the initial stage and then use the evaluation process to narrow down the list to the most critical positions. Keeping the overall goal of succession planning in mind, it’s also important to adopt a long-term perspective when assessing role criticality.
Once all potential important roles have been listed, the Succession Advisory Team (SAT) should evaluate each position against the criteria in the Role Criticality Assessor. It is essential to focus on the functional tasks of the position during the evaluation rather than the individual currently in the role, as the assessor bases evaluations solely on the criticality of the core functions of the role.
When completing the Roles Criticality Assessor, it is also important to consider the organization’s strategic direction and any changes in organizational structure. For example, anticipated changes in organizational design and business models can affect the evaluation of role criticality for succession planning and other human resource investment initiatives.
After evaluating each role, you will be able to develop a shortlist of key roles to consider for your succession plan. To create this shortlist, the Succession Advisory Team (SAT) should allocate time to discuss each of the criteria for the listed roles and narrow the list down to the critical roles that will initially focus on succession planning efforts.
Critical role decisions should be assessed based on a minimum threshold for the total number of points, which the system will calculate according to your selection factors for role importance. Once this threshold is met, roles will be categorized as critical, specialized, core, or non-core.
Thresholds are also set lower for specialized and non-core roles. The lower the SAT threshold for covering specialized and core roles, the more proactive or risk-averse your succession planning process will be.
Once you have identified the criticality of all roles, you may need to work through the succession planning process in multiple stages. Use the levels of criticality—High Critical, Mid Critical, and Low Critical—to determine which roles require immediate attention and prioritize your human resources investment initiatives accordingly.
Begin your succession planning with the roles you’ve identified as having the highest criticality. This approach helps you prioritize your efforts and ensures you are addressing the organization’s most urgent needs first.
It’s important to note that all roles assessed as critical or specialized will be essential to the success of your business. Over time, aim to build a succession planning process for each of these roles.
Finally, take time to assess how potential successors are being developed and ensure that you continue to invest in this practice by rewarding leaders who actively coach and mentor their successors. After addressing the “high, mid, and low critical roles,” also make sure to formalize the succession planning procedure for these specialized roles.
Step. 1
Sign up for your free TPM account here and purchase the Critical Roles Assessors Membership to unlock annual access.
Step. 2
Head over to the Roles Criticality Assessor and enter your details. It’s quick, easy, and only takes a few minutes.
Step. 3
After submitting the form, your personalized PDF report will be emailed to you. Make sure you enter a valid email address!
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