Work Your way out of Your job – and Develop Your Career!
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Succession planning is tedious – or is it? What if you have ambitions – you want to move into a bigger leadership role and develop your skills further – but are currently providing an indispensable service and there is no obvious successor. How could succession planning help you?
Being indispensable also means being unpromotable! The secret to rapid promotion is to keep a sharp focus on developing your team in a way that will secure your legacy of high value work. Creating potential successors and ‘working your way out of a job’ will create time to invest in developing for your next role – and win support from senior management to make the moves that will stretch your horizons.
So how can you develop successors and make it easy for management to release you for the next challenge?
Develop your career by developing your team to take on more responsibility, and delegating work as a learning opportunity. As their capabilities grow so does your time for self-development – and this will bring your career goals closer, sooner!
Being indispensable also means being unpromotable! The secret to rapid promotion is to keep a sharp focus on developing your team in a way that will secure your legacy of high value work. Creating potential successors and ‘working your way out of a job’ will create time to invest in developing for your next role – and win support from senior management to make the moves that will stretch your horizons.
So how can you develop successors and make it easy for management to release you for the next challenge?
- Re-evaluate your role to create a clear vision of an ideal successor. What’s really core to what you deliver for the business irrespective of style or approach? Review your job description and bring it up to date. What skills will your successor need to do as the job stands today and is it likely to evolve over the next couple of years?
- What skills has the job allowed you to develop in yourself? For example, did you need to be a good people manager from the start or did the role allow you to develop this skill? Did you need to be a good listener, or decisive? Asking this allows you to focus on the core requirements, and which could be learned on the job.
- With these skills in mind, review the skills and attributes of your team. Do you have a natural successor? Someone your manager would know can step into your role with the right support and training? If so, follow the remaining steps below. If not you may need to bring in someone new and this will require long-term planning and, potentially, careful handling of current team members! We’ll be publishing a blog for you very soon.
- Don’t just choose one successor and concentrate on them. Sometimes the timing doesn’t work – you’re still looking for your next role when your successor applies to another job! Developing a pool of potentials will help. Also, consider combinations of people. If you found a new role, are there two people who, working together, could keep the team running? This might be good development for both of them!
- Develop the whole team. This will keep them all motivated, team energy high, and help people become able to take advantage of new opportunities as they arise. Who is coasting because the role isn’t stretching them anymore? Which of your current tasks could you delegate to them? Perhaps there’s a regular meeting you chair which they could take on instead. You could plan the transition, giving them support and feedback on how they handled the task. Then, when you are both comfortable, leave them to it. Similarly, there may be regular reports to write or updates to give on projects which someone else in the team could handle. If you are used as a ‘fire-fighter’ by your manager, how often and to what extent do you involve the team? Do more of this so that you become a team of able ‘fire-fighters’ more easily deployed as demand requires.
- Consider underlying skills and audience when delegating. If the tasks you might delegate demand certain skills then consider this when choosing who you delegate to. Perhaps the report requires flair, expression, or brevity. Who is demonstrating this skill already? If delegating a presentation, will the audience mind a ‘beginner’ presenting to them knowing they will be helping a colleague develop a useful skill?
- Release time for your own development. As you become able to delegate more and more of your job, you will release time for your own development. Use this time to initiate new services or business improvements that will raise everyone’s game and build your reputation. Or get involved in new business-wide projects or innovation groups – this extends your network and makes you widely visible – helpful in spotting opportunities. Perhaps you could ask your manager to delegate some of her routine work to you? This will look good at interview, and your manager will in turn have more time for their self-development.
- Write down your plans. Research shows this makes them more likely to become reality! Focus on two or three actions you know you can achieve in the next six months to work your way out of your job. Activate your network by letting people know that you are looking for a bigger challenge – and the key strengths that you’d like to use more. This could lead to becoming aware of opportunities that would suit you.
Develop your career by developing your team to take on more responsibility, and delegating work as a learning opportunity. As their capabilities grow so does your time for self-development – and this will bring your career goals closer, sooner!