Ultimate Performance: Measuring Human Resources at Work

Chapter 10. Succession Planning and Internal Mobility

How does Human Resources link succession planning and internal mobility? What measures of internal mobility can help adjust the enterprise? What measures of succession planning can help identify risk areas?

What does a healthy organization look like in its internal mobility and succession planning goals? Does the executive team think of staff as a collection of employees engaged in their current job? Or, are they a labor market to be leveraged for long-term strategic advantage? How do your employees feel about their long-term prospects inside the company? How about the “A” players that managers are counting on to provide the bulk of your profits? Succession planning and internal mobility are important strategic functions within every organization. This chapter aims to answer these questions not only to help you better understand these concepts, but to show how they can be implemented and measured.

Measuring the dimensions of your Internal Mobility program allows the organization to make decisions on retaining top talent, on where future talent may organically appear, and perhaps on how to increase employee productivity. When creating measures for Internal Mobility, it’s helpful to put it into a market framework.

The simple fact is that you already have an internal labor market within your organization (see Figure 10.1). There are suppliers of talent (employees), consumers of talent (current and future leaders), market makers ...