Stretch Assignments in Succession Planning

Stretch Assignments in Succession Planning

One of the biggest challenges of effective succession planning is creating and maintaining a pool of qualified succession candidates to take over a role when the time comes. Even in the most prepared companies, there are often gaps between the abilities of candidates and the necessary qualifications to perform a role. Assessing the development needs of your succession bench can make these gaps painfully clear and make them feel especially difficult to overcome. To begin closing these gaps, consider creating an individualized development plan for each candidate. This is critical for turning your succession bench’s development needs from broad limitations to concrete objectives. One of the best ways to facilitate this transformation is by using stretch assignments.

What are Stretch Assignments?

Stretch assignments are projects given to employees that require them to perform beyond their current expertise. These assignments promote growth and talent development. They are the equivalent of a trainer asking an athlete to push for one more rep, or to run an extra mile. Pushing our abilities is the only way to get stronger or faster. Stretch assignments take into account an employee’s current limits and ask them to perform just beyond them. When designed well, stretch assignments challenge employees without putting them at risk of certain failure.

Benefits of Stretch Assignments

Besides being an invaluable tool to address your succession bench’s development needs, stretch assignments also have additional benefits:

Communicate Trust and Belief in Succession Candidate

Stretch assignments are real tasks in real situations that will benefit the company now. When an employer assigns responsibility in this way, it communicates that they trust their employee. This can be highly motivating. Not only that, because stretch assignments are intended to be challenging, they also show that the company believes in the candidate’s potential to grow and perform beyond their current abilities.

Provide Value Now

Unlike in-class training, workshops, and other ways of addressing talent development needs, stretch assignments add value to an organization immediately. They involve completing projects and tasks that the organization has a need for. Furthermore, the employee receives an opportunity to learn important skills, and the company points the focus and dedication of a high-potential employee at a project of value.

Uncover great insights

Following a thorough development needs assessment, stretch assignments can provide greater insight into strengths and areas for growth. This is evident as the succession candidate tackles a project with evolving obstacles and difficulties. This complements an initial assessment by providing greater context and allowing for a deeper understanding of a candidate’s talent development needs. Finally, the insights learned from a successful or difficult stretch assignment can help identify better future development activities.

How to Create Stretch Assignments

Despite their potential for addressing candidates’ talent development needs and adding value to an organization, stretch assignments can be a daunting development activity to implement into a candidate’s development plan. They are generally not obvious in the larger scheme of operations, and few companies track the types of talent development opportunities that might make good stretch assignments.

We recommend you encourage succession candidates to identify potential stretch assignments that can be integrated into their development plan. High-potential candidates often have a strong understanding of the kind of experience they need and skills they want to learn. Then, with the results of a development needs assessment at hand, they can match their aspirations to relevant assignments.

Linking stretch assignments to a succession candidate’s development needs provides both them and the company with objective markers of progress. Consistently checking movement towards development plan objectives encourages focus on the stretch assignment’s critical purpose: honing the candidate’s potential for succession.

How SIGMA Can Help

At SIGMA, we want to help your company develop strong candidates with succession planning. Our Launch Series will deliver a personalized succession plan in just 30 DAYS, with only 8 hours of time from your senior leadership team. For more information on our Succession ProcessLaunch Series, or Succession Planning solutions, contact us and learn more about how we can help your organization plan for the future.

About the Author

Sharon Van Duynhoven

Office Manager

Sharon brings our tests and assessments from the development stage to marketable product. She ensures quality control at every step of a project, edits technical documents and manuals, and artistically enhances reports and resources. She also manages contracts with clients across the globe and answers technical questions.