Prioritizing our efforts helps us to make decisions and allocate resources in all that we do. Identifying critical positions or prioritizing is an important part of the succession planning process. It allows organizations to target talent investments to ensure leadership continuity and mitigate risk from leadership attrition. Prioritizing becomes even more important during times of economic turbulence and uncertainty. Determining which positions are the most critical as part of succession planning can be challenging. We won’t find a “standard list” of positions on the internet. Every organization must identify these vital roles in the context of many factors, including market conditions and organizational strategy. For example, companies who require technical innovation to execute their strategy might determine that specific engineering roles are critical while other companies would identify specific marketing roles at most critical.

We are often asked by our clients to help them anticipate common mistakes, obstacles or roadblocks when implementing a succession planning process. Planning ahead not only enables clients to mitigate these obstacles but also allows for thorough contingency planning should those obstacles arise.

The recent news on Steve Jobs’ resignation highlights the importance of having a solid succession planning process in place. In the case of Apple, there was, and is presently, a successor for Steve Jobs however for many organizations this is not the case. When executives leave an organization whether for health reasons, desire to move to another company or retirement, not only does this leave a gaping hole in the executive team but it’s very expensive to fill the role externally (and this certainly comes with no guarantee that the new external hire will “fit” within the organization culturally). If the role is filled unexpectedly with an internal leader, then that person’s role is vacant, and so on and so on.