Leadership

Representation Matters: Integrate Diverse Teams & People From All Backgrounds More Fully into Your Succession Planning

Are diverse teams and people from all backgrounds a core consideration for your leadership succession planning and other leadership talent management activities?

Given the increasing emphasis, priority, and scrutiny associated with having a truly representative and inclusive workforce, it should be.

Organizations across sectors are evolving their models and processes related to who has the potential to lead, focusing on greater equity in development and advancement decisions. That means everything from structured leadership development programs to informal mentorship of people in underrepresented groups within the organization.

There is a growing need to view succession planning with building diverse teams and people from all backgrounds, including the development of practical initiatives to ensure better representation among top management, as well as at other organizational levels. Learn how Heidrick Navigator can help integrate business priorities effectively into leadership decisions and development.

Diverse teams in Succession Planning

Here are some of the specific, challenging questions businesses and other organizations encounter as they strive to incorporate greater representation into their leader advancement and hiring practices:

How to develop and implement succession plans that consider attrition (expected and unexpected) and address diverse teams and targets related to current and future leadership decisions
How to increase the visibility of candidates in leadership pipelines, including identifying promising rising leaders and ensuring they have meaningful high-profile growth opportunities
How to refine and streamline existing succession plans built on inconsistent, incomplete, and/or siloed data sources—such as sources that include divergent role definitions and performance metrics
How to understand, at-a-glance, the current leadership talent in the organization and cross-index that with key dimensions important to your organization

Answering these and related questions requires a comprehensive, systematic approach to delivering effective strategies for succession planning.

But most organizations lack a proven system that delivers the information and insights they need in this space. Leaders genuinely may want to prioritize building diverse teams with people from all backgrounds while assessing and advancing promising leadership candidates, but simply do not have the tools to achieve the best, most sustainable results. That is where Heidrick Navigator can be a critical asset.

Learn more about Heidrick Navigator

Assess, manage, and develop your leadership population at scale to achieve your goals.

Heidrick Navigator: A Systematic, Digital Approach

Heidrick Navigator provides a dynamic digital solution: a research-based system that will help you make truly data-driven succession and leadership decisions that take key, measurable leadership talent metrics into account.

Navigator delivers high-value reports, metrics, and insights for leadership-related decision-making based on the full set of leader talent data available across your business. All outputs can be customized to include demographic information that is of high priority in your organization. Among these deliverables are:

Leadership overview report

This provides a snapshot of your current leadership talent across key dimensions to understand how it aligns with current and future needs.

Successors report

Heidrick Navigator presents lists and assessments of rising leaders in three categories—Ready Now, Ready Soon, Ready Later—to prepare strategically for natural and unexpected attrition with representativeness top of mind.

Assessment results

You can instantly access results of ongoing leadership assessments on leadership talent dimensions such as business impact, leadership capabilities, leadership potential, and culture impact, in line with the Heidrick Leadership Framework, which can be cross-indexed with demographic information.

Pipeline visibility

Heidrick Navigator enables you to see who’s in the leadership talent pipeline (such as the Ready Now and Ready Soon leaders from the Successors Report) and how representative these groups are as compared to organizational goals or targets.

Unconventional matches

Sometimes, the best fit for a leadership role is a less traditional one. That can especially be the case when seeking first-time leaders from groups with less representation at the top. Heidrick Navigator unlocks these high-value potential matches more easily than intuition or traditional systems

Heidrick Navigator’s outputs and insights will help you integrate these initiatives more fully into succession and other leadership-related activities, including:

Understanding and assessing your current leadership talent pool on the dimensions that matter most to your organization
Creating comprehensive succession plans for organizational leadership roles using measured capabilities, potential, and formerly siloed data to true consistency and comparability related to leader impact and potential
Identifying a wider, more representative set of potential successors to drive faster, more efficient, and more equitable succession and development decisions
Tracking metrics against succession and advancement goals in real-time to know whether, when, and what leadership talent-related initiatives to pursue

Representation matters—more than ever. Understanding how to build diverse teams with people from all backgrounds and integrating it into succession and other advancement decisions are critical and should lead to better performance, culture, and morale.

Heidrick Navigator provides the visibility and insights you need to embed these initiatives and measures more fully into all your leadership talent development activities for the good of your business and your people.