When you do succession planning for your organization, start by asking yourself some critical questions as you begin the process of finding your internal subject matter experts. By identifying some initial information, you will ensure that you are talking to the right people and asking the right questions as you collect valuable information that allows your company to thrive beyond the work lives of the experts under your roof.

We’ve all heard of people who have been laid off during downsizing or have retired after 30 years of service only to be called back to their desks under a lucrative independent contract because, when they left, they took critical information or skills with them. With a proactive succession management plan in place on an ongoing basis, companies can save themselves the costs of these valuable contracts and your retired employees can move to Hawaii, even if they are less enriched by the generosity of the company that found it could not go on smoothly without them.

Finding Your Critical SMEs Before They Leave

To find your critical SMEs, ask these questions: What is it that makes your business hum? is it your great products? Your incredible customer service? Your patented product that is nearly impossible to reverse engineer? The personalities of the core founders? The people who understand your financials? The person who does your data analysis?

When you can identify what keeps your customers coming back for more, you will have isolated the knowledge, skills and attitudes that need to be preserved. It’s not as easy as it sounds, but not as difficult as you might think, either.

Rest assured that it is not just one product, one person, or one department that holds the key to your company’s value in the marketplace. The essence of what makes your company hum is a combination of the people, processes and information that come together as your distinctive brand.

Look Beyond Your Secret Sauce

Think of the fast food hamburger. People may come to the drive-up to get a tasty burger with “sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun”. But they may be able to get an equally tasty burger across the street. What is it that keeps them coming back to your drive-up?

Perhaps it is the smiling servers, clean restrooms, dependable quality of the food and the utensils that make the whole experience reliably enjoyable. So while you need to make sure you have the recipe for the burger, you also need to be talking to maintenance about their cleaning schedule, human resources about their customer service training, public relations about the promotions and vendor management about the paper products and bakery suppliers.

Do Succession Planning In An Organized Way

While this is a simple and obvious example, when you extend it to what is probably your much more complicated business, it will help you think through all the important aspects of your organization when you are doing a 360 degree succession plan – one that leaves no stone unturned. The best way to drill down and find your internal experts is to look at your organizational matrix and analyze it by functional area.

Who does what? Who else, if anyone, can do it? What do your knowledge workers know?

You may find it is that quiet guy in the corner who has been turning out reports and talking on the phone to your customers who you may have to call back out of retirement because, in his absence, people really notice what he did.