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Succession planning is tough; we all know that. Creating a concrete plan for an inherently unpredictable situation is a slippery business.

What’s more, it’s easy to neglect the process while the economy is in a recession. Your retention rates of existing employees are most likely up, and new candidates are beating down the door just to be considered.

Despite this embarrassment of riches on the resource side, succession planning is a critical process that must not be overlooked. Here’s why:

• It’s crucial to the fate of the company in moments of change.
• In a recession, it’s more important than ever to make your investments in human capital pay off.
• The workforce is aging, and disproportionate numbers will be retiring in the coming years of your career.
• Employees are more loyal and motivated when they know there is a culture of succession.
• The very exercise of planning can reveal important truths about your organization.

The loss of a key leader puts your business at risk in a number of ways, and the days after a major change can make or break a company. When it happens –- and it will -– will your organization be confused, gossiping, and rudderless? Or will you have a smart, adaptable plan in place to keep confidence high as you guide the organization through change?

Here are what top HR execs advise to make your succession planning more relevant and realistic:

• Last week, Dan at Great Leadership by Dan blogged about an article by Marshall Goldsmith in the most recent Harvard Business Online, “Four Tips for Efficient Succession Planning.” All four areas covered are strong, but our favorite pointers involve the realism (or lack of it) in succession planning. One example:
  

  The head of engineering is a high performing leader who has the potential to be COO. She has always been in an engineering role. If she had sales experience, she would be even more ready to be the COO so her development plan is written to include a job move to be head of sales. However, this company would never take the risk of putting someone without sales experience in the top sales job — so her development plan perpetually says, ‘move to a sales job’ even though that will never happen.

  Goldsmith really zeroes in on the gap between “the best-laid plans” and cold, hard reality — and you should, too.

• In February, Dennis Carey, a recruiter specializing in CEO- and Director-level candidates, launched CEOSuccession.com. His key practices are not to be missed. Some of the best tips are getting the board of directors active and involved, and regularly exposing up-and-coming managers to the board. He also recommends getting top candidates exposed to the outside media and the financial community to see how they will handle the challenge. Finally, Carey recommends tying some of a CEO’s compensation to successful succession planning, so they are quite literally invested in the plan.
• In her post Leadership Pipeline vs. Succession Planning, HR blogger Meg Bear observes that the best companies are not just thinking about mere succession planning –- they’re creating an entire “leadership pipeline” focused on identifying and investing in future leaders. Succession planning seems more relevant and less theoretical when under this paradigm. Meg’s been reading The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership Powered Company and recommends it. She closes by asking,
  

  Do you really believe you can hire your way to all the talent you will need to compete in the marketplace today? What about in ten years’ time? Can you afford to under-utilize your talent?”

  For most of us, the answer is no, no, and no, and then a slightly unsettled notion that we should be looking into our own leadership pipeline.

What about you? Are you actively involved in a succession plan? What are your best tips to get top management invested? Do you have a success story of how your plan worked when you were faced with the loss of a key employee?

Today’s job market may feel a bit like Dr. Dolittle’s fantastical trip to Africa, with odd creatures popping up along the journey, but the reality is the “workplace that works” hasn’t changed as much as some might think. Fantasy aside, it’s still pulled by leaders and pushed by managers. It takes both.

The “pushmi-pullyu” in Dr. Dolittle’s great adventure was a two-headed antelope who got nowhere because one head pulled and the other pushed. Both wanted to lead; neither would follow. Fun in a children’s book; disaster in the workplace.

In these tighter times, corporations can’t afford to discover on the job whether an executive will be a leader or a manager. The pressure is on for HR generalists and hiring managers to put the peg into the proper hole immediately, so the process perks from the get-go. Fortunately for jobseekers, there’s a need for both: determined to get-it-done managers and leap-to-a-new-level leaders.

Hearts and Minds

Management and leadership are not the same thing. Related, yes. Overlapping, of course. Co-dependent, certainly.

“Leadership is about capturing hearts and minds. You are a leader when people choose to follow you,” says Joel Cheesman of Cheezhead. Cheesman says people buying into an effort, a vision or an idea because of its merit is very different from buying into it because someone is “the boss” He also says, “if you have ever used the word ’subordinate’ to describe a person you work with, you are not a leader.”

Managers are those hearts and minds the leader captures; not subordinates, but team members providing fuel and stability for the rocket. A good manager yearns to be “captured,” to take the challenging vision, rein it in to just within reason and rack up an achievement shared with the leader who then feels quite comfortable to keep on leading. No “pushmi-pullyu” organization here.

The defining line between leadership and management is the contrast between stability and vision. The manager keeps everything stable while the leader projects a new vision. Does this mean the leader is not interested in stability? Of course not. Without it, he can’t lead. Does this mean the manager just wants a quiet, stable workplace? Of course not. Without a new vision, he has nothing challenging to manage. Working together, they keep the organization grounded and moving forward, which avoids stagnation.

“Good leaders keep teams of employees motivated and engaged. Those teams make up the organization. It’s been well documented that employees leave because of bad leadership, and bad leadership affects the company’s bottom line,” points out Kevin Grossman of HR Marketer.

Know Yourself

Are you more into finding answers to existing problems? Managers do that.

Are you more into posing “what ifs?” and “what nexts?” Sounds like a leader.

Do you get into the details of “what, how, when and where?” Good management.

Do you ponder “where next?” and “why not us?” Lead on.

In the best sense, the manager tempers the leader’s flights of fancy, while the leader prevents the manager from getting just a little too comfortable.

Whether you’re walking the career path yourself right now, or, as an HR generalist, perusing the pathwalkers to find the perfect fit for a company, this is a “know thyself” moment in time.

As a jobseeker, know whether your temperament is more to manage or more to lead. Identify your own strengths. Once you do that, you can build on them. Most importantly, clearly identified strengths can be better projected . . . and that’s attractive, which can make all the difference in today’s competitive environment.

The U.K.’s HR Magazine recently published an in-depth story on online outplacement programs, and how technology promises to reshape the outplacement industry. RiseSmart was featured prominently in the story by Robert Gray. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

With the pace of technological change showing no sign of slowing down, it was only a matter of time before outplacement technologies and those of the job boards began to merge. RiseSmart, a Dallas-based job site for $100,000-plus executives, marries technology with human expertise using its Job Concierge team. In December 2008, the company received $3 million in venture capital funding, following on from $1.5 million in seed funding in 2007.

RiseSmart’s trained HR professionals match opportunities with jobseekers based on each member’s unique profile, freeing them to focus on networking or the demands of their current jobs. Specifically in the outplacement field, RiseSmart offers Transition Concierge, which bundles its Job Concierge service with CV preparation and other transition management services, to assist a corporation’s laid-off workers. “We believe others will attempt to copy our approach,” says RiseSmart CEO and founder Sanjay Sathe. “The fact that we have secured Fortune 500 clients and Silicon Valley funding in such a short period of time has definitely turned some heads.”

Sathe argues his company has some competitive advantages that are difficult for others to replicate. For example, it uses proprietary technology to search web job listings and then to filter these into categories, such as $100,000-plus marketing management jobs. Only then does its trained team of HR professionals step in to match jobs for clients.

“We believe RiseSmart Transition Concierge is a classic example of disruptive innovation, and we expect nothing less than to turn the current, bloated corporate outplacement market on its head,” adds Sathe. “Traditional services will ultimately go the way of the dinosaur. We know that our corporate customers are blown away by the technology, and they include some of the largest, most technologically-sophisticated companies in the world.”

Employers are, says Sathe, frustrated with traditional services, because they cost a lot but do not demonstrate measurable value for laid-off employees. He says providing group-counselling sessions, temporary use of office space and other ’soft’ services are not sufficient when what employees really want is help in finding a new job.

RiseSmart has no immediate expansion plans but longer term is eyeing up all English-speaking countries, including Canada, the UK and India. Expect more hybrid recruitment and outplacement models to follow.