Here are some ideas on how to do this.
Continuity of leadership and management is essential to maintain operational stability in an organisation at the very least. Poorly executed succession strategies can have severe and long lasting impacts to an organisation’s sustainability, competitiveness and culture. A learning management system (LMS) can play a key role in helping you develop and execute successful succession strategies.
An LMS centralises training and development regardless of the training modality. Your LMS is the source of learning resources as well as easily tracking and monitoring the learning and development of identified and potential successors. With centralisation, you are making it easy to coordinate and deliver learning and development across the organisation as well as targeting high potentials and fast trackers for preparation for succession programs.
Your LMS enables you to create customised learning paths tailored to individual development needs. When you have this capability coupled with assessing people’s skills and competencies, you are able to design programs that address specific gaps and align learning with career goals and succession possibilities. Using a tailored approach with learning paths, you will build engagement and identify high-potential candidates for succession opportunities.
Your LMS should be offering continuous learning opportunities. You can achieve this by offering various resources such as online learning, webinars, collaborative learning, downloadable files and other resources to build knowledge and capability. You can foster a culture of learning within an organisation when you broaden the scope of resource types and availability in your LMS.
You can use the data collected by your LMS to refine your strategies and improve succession outcomes. The learning and performance data from your LMS gives you insight into the learning progress, preferences and performance of potential successors. You can use data on completion rates, assessment scores, learner feedback and other metrics to assess the effectiveness of your training programs and make data driven decisions on your succession strategies.
Knowledge sharing and collaboration is so often neglected by organisations and their use of an LMS. However, collaboration and knowledge sharing is an essential element in an effective learning culture. Features such as discussion forums, user based content development and teams based learning are all effective to foster meaningful peer to peer interactions and can help build relationships among potential succession candidates.
Your LMS should be an essential tool to help you build and execute effective succession strategies. You can reduce the risk of poor succession execution and all of the impacts this can have on your organisation by utilising the LMS effectively. I have outlined 5 ways you can achieve and I am sure there are more.
If you would like to explore how you can implement a succession strategy in your organisation, you can get in touch with me via LinkedIn. I am always happy to share ideas.
