Inclusive Succession Planning: A Toolkit for Employers
Inclusive Succession Planning: A Toolkit for Employers
70 per cent of UK employees from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) backgrounds said career progression was important to them 1. 52 percent said that they believed that to progress they would have to leave their current employer 1. The Race at Work Charter‘s fifth principle is addressing this by asking employers to take action that supports Black, Asian, Mixed Race and other ethnically diverse employee career progression. This toolkit provides employers with insight and recommends a range of actions they can take to increase diversity in their talent pipelines, ensuring inclusive succession planning.
Succession planning is about determining who will lead your organisation into the future. It is about identifying which key positions are at risk and vital to your organisation’s smooth operation and then developing pools of talent that are ready to be drawn from at any time for any reason. Simply put, succession planning is your current and ‘emergency replacement’ talent pool. It can also be a key tool to drive engagement within your organisation. For inclusive succession planning the criteria, skills and abilities which are a requirement for candidates should be clear, transparent and accessible.
The leadership pipeline of today needs to be inclusive of BAME talent to ensure that senior management roles of the future and workplaces reflect an increasingly diverse working-age population. Only one in 16 people in management positions are from a BAME background, in contrast to one in ten in the workplace and one in eight of the working age population 1. The McGregor-Smith Review highlighted that tackling these race disparities in the UK would provide an annual income boost of £24 billion to the UK economy.