Every leader wants to build a high-performing team capable of taking the reins. That’s where succession planning comes in. It’s not just about preparing for the day you move on; it’s about developing a pipeline of talent ready to step up when opportunities arise. By investing in your team’s growth, you’re not only ensuring business continuity but also fostering a culture of development and advancement. People retire, people leave their roles and, new roles are created during reorganizations and restructuring efforts. All of these scenarios may create the need for someone else to take over in a leadership role and the question becomes… do you have anyone available internally who is promotion-ready?
Knowing who can step into a key role when needed is crucial. It’s like having a bench full of star players ready to take the field. By keeping a close eye on your team’s strengths and potential, you can ensure a smooth transition and minimize disruptions when leadership changes occur.
You’ve got the employee survey results. Great! But don’t just let them gather dust. Find the biggest pain points, make an action plan, and get moving. It’s about turning those numbers into real improvements. Remember, less is often more. Focus on a few key areas instead of trying to fix everything at once. Let your team know you’re listening and planning to make needed changes.
The first template helps you pinpoint exactly what worked and what didn’t. Don’t just list random stuff – get specific. Once you know what to improve, create clear action steps. Make sure you can measure your progress and know when an action is complete by defining what done looks like.
A powerful way to develop employees is to give them a portfolio assignment. This would be something they are asked to do while they remain responsible for their normal daily duties. Motivated employees with the ambition to learn new skills and take advantage of new opportunities to achieve developmental goals typically welcome such assignments. Portfolio assignments are less popular among employees who are less driven to succeed and develop their careers.
Training departments are usually expected to provide an annual plan showing training classes and learning interventions which will be offered over the course of the year. Managers want to see when they can plan to send employees to attend specific training courses and they also would like to see that the training plan addresses key areas where performance improvement may be needed for their departments or business units. Lastly, there is also usually the need to create a budget for the planned training. All of these focus areas are covered in the templates that can be downloaded below.
What kind of training should you provide?
Consider the following sources of information which could help:
Company strategies for growth and developing into new markets or expanding in existing markets – what skills would be needed?
Based on current performance – which skills need to be introduced and which skills should be improved upon?
Looking at employee career goals, which skills do you need to focus on in order to help move employees to being promotion-ready?
Which skills do managers believe would help their teams succeed better given performance targets and customer demands?
Summary of the kinds of Training Needs to Identify
Tools and Templates
Here are three tools that can help you with conducting a training needs analysis. The first tool highlights individual training needs per employee and is based on employee self assessments. The second tool is a training needs view from a manager’s perspective focusing on the top 3 highest training needs for each employee in his/her group/team/department. The last tool helps you budget for the planned training.
Self-rated individual training needs. The quality of the results you obtain from this tool depends on whether you have a good career development tool/framework in place, motivated employees who maintain and work on their own development plans on an on-going basis and whether your managers/supervisors provide quality performance feedback to employees on a regular basis.
Manager assessment of department/team. Using knowledge of employee performance in his/her department, the manager selects the top 3 courses that each employee would need to improve own performance and/or to grow further in his/her career. Be sure to share course details with the managers too – what is the duration of the course and what aspects of the topic is covered?
Training needs and budgeting. This spreadsheet helps you budget for the planned courses. Check actual spending against this estimate to track the accuracy of your original budget and accurate allocation of items charged to your training budget.
Create a training needs analysis process that you follow consistently every year. This helps managers get into a rhythm of providing you with the required information on time for you to submit budget requests for the following year/quarter.
Be clear with managers which part of the training costs would be booked to their own budgets. For example – where do employees charge their time when they are in a training class? To your budget or to their manager’s budget?
Ask yourself how much training does it make sense to provide internally vs using an external vendor. Make wise trade-offs in terms of training costs, best value for money, expertise needed to provide the training etc.
Determining the training plan for the following year should also include a good review of the training evaluations and feedback obtained from course participants during the lasts year. Are your current training classes good enough or do they need to be improved or outsourced?
When employees complete internal courses, one can be stuck with having to create a professional-looking training certificate for training participants. Not everyone has a knack for that, so here is a basic basic template (you can download it below) which can give you a good starting point for making your own training certificates. It is in *.ppt (Microsoft PowerPoint) format so you can edit the details as needed.
Receiving a training certificate is good way to recognize employees for completing required training courses and handing them out during a townhall meeting or other company event can help reinforce how much the company values the completions.
Using technology currently available to us it is more possible to avoid printing paper versions of a certificate. You can create the certificate electronically and also add digital signatures then save it as a *.pdf document or a picture. That way distribution can take place by means of sharing a hyperlink to the certificate or attaching an electronic file to an email addressed to the recipients.
Some tips:
When you customize the file or change elements, beware of creating something that is overly colorful and “busy” with competing elements – graphic and text.
When you insert digital signatures be very careful about who has access to those. It is a very sensitive graphic to have and can easily be abused if it falls into the wrong hands.
There are often people who do not show up for a training event. The difficulty then becomes how do you track who attended or the total training/learning hours that employees have spent in a month/year? The simplest answer is of course to introduce a sign-in sheet for training events. It is simply one printed sheet (or more) that is made available at the training location where training participants can sign in to indicate their attendance.
The top of the sign-in sheet contains details of the event such as the title, the date, location, name of the trainer etc.
Beyond the Basics: The Importance of Effective Training Evaluation
It’s easy to get caught up in the logistics of training – did people show up, did they enjoy the food, was the room comfortable? While these factors are important, they don’t tell us if the training actually worked. To truly measure the effectiveness of a training program, we need to dig deeper.
Focusing solely on surface-level feedback, like how attendees felt about the event or the trainer, is like judging a book by its cover. It might look good on the outside, but what really matters is what’s inside – the knowledge gained, the skills developed, and the behavior changes that occur.
To delve deeper you may want to consider questions like:
Continuous learners have the best chances of being noticed for new opportunities and promotions. It is important to be structured around what you will focus on learning next. Ask for feedback from more senior people around you or from your manager/supervisor. Then create a personal development plan for yourself. As you complete learning goals, set new learning goals and update your personal development plan accordingly.
The best way to have a structured learning approach is to have a Development Plan. Creating your own development plan is the first step towards mapping out your learning needs and priorities. Ask someone with experience to help you with it. It could be your supervisor or manager and it can also be a coach or mentor that you are working with. Such a person should be able to provide you with valuable feedback as you aim to prioritize your planned development actions.
Sometimes you don’t want to run a full employee engagement survey, but you just want to do a quick check to see how things are going. Call it a “mood meter” or a high level check to see if you can catch some underlying issues that may require further investigation.
Of course it is understood that a quick check is not meant for applications where the correlation between questions and outcomes require a statistically defensible position. HR folks and OD folks sometimes just need a quick tool that would help you see if there may be a trend that is worth looking into further at your location. Sometimes the trend you see can be as simple as a low level of responses to your quick check.
The Rethink Shelf 