Building a management pipeline

Succession planning is an essential part of planning for the future of your organisation. Understanding how to nurture your top talent helps employees to feel involved in your strategy, which leads to a sense of belonging and stronger engagement. Planning for the future should provide development opportunities at every level, including employees with leadership aspirations or potential. But what does it take to transform a colleague into a manager?

In this blog we’ll be looking at the factors to consider to build a steady management pipeline and the key steps to take to set your team and organisation up for success. First, let’s address the obvious question...

What is a management pipeline?

Setting up a management pipeline is about creating a plan to promote employees into leadership roles from within. This should build a steady flow of talent ready to step up into managerial positions as leaders leave or retire from the organisation. Planning what that management pipeline looks like can benefit your business in terms of retaining consistency and experience, and also save on external recruitment costs.

Factors to consider

1. Age of workforce

Workforce data is more accessible than ever thanks to the HR Systems and databases businesses are investing in. If you don’t already have a managerial pipeline, analysing your workforce demographics may provide the reality check senior leaders need to start creating one. 

1. Future business strategy

Is your current management structure designed to support future business strategy, or does it need to flex to deliver your goals? Will you take existing leaders with you or do you need to recruit a new wave of managers to deliver the strategy? And what skills, behaviours and competencies does a manager of the future need to possess?

The core competencies of a manager include strengths in communication, delegation, finance, strategy, decision-making, motivating a team, interview techniques, and managing difficult conversations to name a few! Over time you may decide to add to these to keep teams motivated and deliver your strategy.

1. Engagement

Employee engagement surveys can reveal a lot about how colleagues are feeling about their work, leadership, and intent to stay within the business. Feedback at both colleague and manager level should be taken into account when planning your pipeline. For example, if a high proportion of colleagues say they don’t see a future for themselves within the organisation, perhaps your plan should include creating and communicating realistic opportunities for career progression.      

Planning your management pipeline

1. Identify business critical roles

Taking people, personalities and emotions out of the equation, which roles could your business not do without? These are the roles to prioritise when it comes to succession planning. Think about the steps you need to take to mitigate the risk of losing people in essential leadership roles. Offering development opportunities, encouraging knowledge sharing, work shadowing and mentoring are all possible solutions.

1. Assess where the skills gaps are

Taking a snapshot of workforce strengths and weaknesses is a useful way to identify where the managerial skills gaps are. You could carry out your own talent assessment or bring in an external HR provider like us to do this on your behalf. The results will provide valuable input for your pipeline plan.

1. Bridge the skills gaps with learning and development opportunities

Once you know where the skills gaps are you need to work out how to fill them. Investing in career development and progression to bridge skills gaps builds confidence and competencies in managers of the future.

This is the type of challenge our learning and development consultant thrives on, so if you need help please get in touch! We love to work with organisations that are committed to building a culture of development through a variety of learning solutions, from workshops and coaching, to mentoring and work shadowing.

1. Monitor progress to ensure a healthy managerial pipeline

For a managerial pipeline to be successful you will need to regularly monitor progress and manage relationships at three levels:

• Gain commitment from senior leadership

• Have open conversations with people in managerial roles about their future intent, and

• Make it clear what colleagues need to do to progress to the next level.

Secondly, you must give aspiring managers in your team the chance to put their newly acquired skills or knowledge into action, then review and feed back on their progress. Opportunities might look like stepping up to lead a project, secondments, managing your team whilst you are on holiday, and putting people forward for internal vacancies (whilst also planning how you will fill their role from within should they be successful!).

Be transparent about leadership opportunities

One of the biggest demotivating influences at work is when an employee sees the same people being promoted over and over. Colleagues end up believing that there aren’t opportunities for people like them to achieve leadership and management positions. Engagement surveys suggest this contributes to declining morale and employees looking for opportunities to progress their career elsewhere.

That’s why it’s so important to share management vacancies internally and encourage employees with the potential to apply for them to do just that. Use development conversations to talk openly to your team about their leadership aspirations. Share roles on noticeboards, via email, newsletters and internal social channels before searching for talent outside of the business. Knowing there is a next step available to you is motivating and gives employees a sense of belonging.

Talk to us about building a managerial pipeline

A team member with aspirations to manage is very different from a team member who has the skills and confidence to manage and lead a team. That person may have read all of the books and completed the courses, yet never had any experience of putting theory into practice. Aspiring leaders need the right skills development and opportunities to hone their skills in real-life situations. If you don’t plan for their development you are setting your future leaders up to fail.

When it comes to sound succession planning, don’t leave anything to chance. Create an internal management pipeline, develop your people to keep them inspired and motivated to succeed so they are ready to take the next step.

Talk to us about learning solutions, bespoke management development programmes and workshops. Call us today on 0161 941 2426.

Further reading

If you enjoyed this subject, take a look at our blogs on Agile Career Pathways, Upskiling and Reskilling your People, and Setting Meaningful Goals and Objectives, plus our free ebook on People Planning for 2024.