I recently wrote an article on succession planning, and thought I’d share some of it with you . We’ve talked a lot about the benefits of taking a talent pool driven approach to succession planning, so I’m not going to rehash why you need to get rid of the org-chart model here. I wanted to take some time to look at some of the incorrect assumptions that can be made when talent pools are not managed closely. Succession planning expert William Rothwell outlines a few that are important to carefully consider, in order to ensure the success of your initiative. These include:

Assuming Success at One Level Will Guarantee Success at a Higher Level

An individual’s success at one level is no guarantee of success at higher levels of responsibility. The reason is simple: the competencies required for success at each level are different. Hence, it is important to separate thinking about how well someone does his or her current job and how well he or she might do a job at a higher level of responsibility.

Assuming Bosses Are Always the Best Judges of Who is Appropriate for Promotions

This is not always true. Bosses are self-interested players in the succession game. They have a stake in what happens to people. Indeed, some bosses do not want to see their best people promoted for fear of being unable to replace them. Some bosses grade people by their own standards—the result is that some individuals who are unlike the boss are not considered for promotion. While the support of a boss is useful in developing individuals, more objective assessments, such as multi-raters evaluations are excellent in aiding the manager’s decisions.

Assuming Everyone Wants a Promotion

This is also not always true today. In many downsized organizations, workers have seen what pressures their bosses have to deal with. Some say “leave me out of that.” It is unwise to assume that everyone wants a promotion—or even to assume that money or other incentives will convince everyone to seek out or accept promotion. It will not. Check first. Find out what people really want to do. For that reason, many organizations launch both a top-down succession planning program and a bottom-up career planning and training program to galvanize development efforts both among managers and among individual employees.

At the end of the day, implementing succession planning requires long-term organizational change, and a clear understanding of the challenges that come with it. It definitely requires a greater commitment to a more strategic view of how to meet talent needs.