Succession planning (SP) is the plan an organization develops to meet its most critical employment needs, and the plan an organization employs to fill its most critical leadership and professional positions. It is the ongoing, purposeful, and systematic identification of qualified and appropriate successors to leadership, with a commitment to assessing, developing, and investing in organizational leadership to enhance performance, development, and preparedness. A current nursing leadership crisis exists in health care and warrants deliberate succession planning efforts. This paper sets forth a process for succession planning in nursing management and includes professional and career development, …show more content…
Succession planning (SP) is the plan an organization employs to fill its most critical leadership and professional positions (Huang, 2001). It is the ongoing, purposeful, and systematic identification of qualified and appropriate successors to leadership, with a commitment to assessing, developing, and investing in organizational leadership to enhance performance, development, and preparedness (Kim, 2003; McDonald, 2006). Michelson (2006), SP requires putting the right people on the bus, getting the wrong people off the bus, and positioning the right people in the right seats (Michelson, 2006). SP is simply having the right people in the right place at the right time (Conger & Fulmer, 2003; Rothwell, …show more content…
Ineffective or nonexistent healthcare succession planning has the potential to heighten the nursing leadership crisis. Thirty-eight percent of the healthcare succession planning efforts are focused on top-level senior executives, primarily in the “C-suite,” such as chief executive officers (CEO), chief nursing officers, and chief financial officers (Garman & Tyler, 2007). However, best practice specifies multilayered succession planning models to include all key leadership and management positions (National Center for Healthcare Leadership [NCHL], 2005).
One of the first stages in succession planning is to develop succession objectives. Good succession planning objectives fills management positions with high- quality people who have been groomed to fill the vacancies. The implementation of succession planning objectives does not depend only on leaders or managers, as the responsibility is shared with the organization and its systems for staff development (Hosis et. al.,