Coaching for Competencies: How a Business Coach Can Help With Succession Planning
Coaching for Competencies: How a Business Coach Can Help With Succession Planning
When we think about succession planning, how often are we also thinking about business coaching?
A solid succession plan is a non-negotiable, and businesses must continuously evaluate their ability to manage turnover and retain the talent they need. Why? Current labour shortages are not just the result of a pandemic-era shake-up — they’re here to stay. With the last of Canada’s Baby Boomer generation reaching the age of 65 by 2030, this segment of the workforce is edging toward retirement and there are not enough new workers to replace them.
Succession planning and the ability to attract and retain talent will be among the most critical challenges organizations will face in the coming years. And that means businesses need to get creative and strategic about how they develop talent from within.
Here are five reasons you should be building coaching into your succession plans.
It Helps You Understand the Employee’s Goals
Making assumptions about an employee’s career goals can lead to costly mistakes. Regardless of talent or potential, if an employee has different professional priorities or considering marking a career switch, they will not be a suitable candidate to base your succession plans on.
By providing an employee with coaching, you give them a safe space to talk through their needs, interests and objectives, and you gain a more accurate assessment of where they fit in your organization’s future.
It Helps You Prepare for Future Business Challenges
How much has your business changed since 2020? We’re willing to guess that for most of you, the answer is quite a bit.
This pace of change will only continue to accelerate as the world adapts to new technologies and challenges. In this environment, succession planning also needs to be about preparing for the challenges of the future.
While laying groundwork for the unknown will never be a straight line, investing in soft skills like resilience, decision-making, leadership, and collaboration is an essential place to start. By building on existing strengths, addressing areas for development, and aligning values with culture, business coaches can play an indispensable role in preparing leaders for those future unknowns.
It Saves Time and Money
Simply put, recruitment is time-consuming and expensive.
Investing in building talent internally is often a far more cost-effective strategy in the long run.
Also, if your business doesn’t have the talent you need to replace key roles, you’ll likely be left scrambling to fill vacant positions quickly — and that often means paying a premium to get the talent you need. Coaching can help you build out critical roles more sustainably over the long term.
It Meets Multiple Objectives
Coaching isn’t just a strategy to support succession planning; it offers a range of supports for related business objectives, including:
Improving workplace culture and talent retention by demonstrating your commitment to internal mobility.
Building skills that support and benefit the entire team.
Minimizing the potential of lost institutional knowledge and decreasing onboarding time.
Boosting confidence, communication, and collaboration while reducing burnout and decision fatigue.
It Helps Leaders Leave a Legacy
Every leader wants to ensure that a business is left in good hands. A coach can work closely with both exiting leaders and potential new ones to identify mutual goals and outcomes and create a plan to help with essential knowledge transfer.
Whatever your succession needs are, a professional coaching plan will help. By preparing now, you make inevitable transitions far easier down the road.
The expert coaching team at Cenera brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to help your business prepare for the challenge of succession planning. Our team works closely with your organization to build customized solutions for your needs.
Contact us to learn more about our Coaching programs.
Share This Story, Choose Your Platform!
Let’s Connect
Never miss an update, click here to subscribe to our monthly newsletter.
Plus, follow us on LinkedIn!
