Succession Planning in Public Administration: When No One Steps Up

The head of department leaves, and the post stays vacant for months: a scenario that forward-looking staff planning can prevent.

In many administrations, a large number of staff will reach retirement age over the coming years. The baby-boomer generation is increasingly leaving the workforce, and the recruitment needs of public authorities are rising accordingly. When a leadership position becomes vacant and no successor has been prepared, a gap opens that cannot be closed quickly: knowledge is lost, decisions stall, and the search for a suitable replacement often takes longer than planned.

Staff turnover is predictable, if you look for it

HR controlling and staffing requirement assessments serve exactly this purpose: the ongoing determination of foreseeable staff turnover based on the age structure of the workforce. Anyone who knows the age distribution on their own staffing list has advance notice of which positions will become vacant in the coming years due to retirement. This applies to case-handling posts just as much as to leadership positions, though leadership positions carry a particular risk: they cannot simply be refilled, because they require professional experience, leadership competence and often informal knowledge of structures that have grown over time.

Staff turnover analyses provide more than just a departure date. They also reveal which areas of work are placing particular strain on staff, who may as a result be considering a move themselves. An administration that ignores these signals will be caught off guard by departures that, on closer inspection, had long been signalled.

Staff planning as a foundation, not a reaction

Staff planning and staffing requirement assessment form the foundation of the entire HR function and, with it, of succession planning. Its aim is to ensure that the administration has sufficient, qualified staff at all times to carry out its tasks. This cannot be achieved if a replacement process is only started once a resignation or a retirement notice is already on the table.

A lead time of several years is more sensible, during which foreseeable requirements within the staffing list are systematically analysed. For leadership positions this means, in concrete terms: who could be considered if the current post holder leaves? What development steps would this person need to go through in the meantime, so that they are genuinely ready to take over at the point of transition? These questions can only be answered if staff planning is not viewed in isolation, but thought through together with the development and qualification of existing staff.

Making use of the interface with organisational management

Staff planning has an interface with other cross-cutting areas of the administration, in particular with organisational management. Through appropriate assessment procedures, organisational units determine which tasks need to be carried out, to what extent and at what level of quality. For succession planning this means: before a position is refilled, it is worth asking whether the existing scope of the post still matches current tasks, or whether the transition also presents an opportunity to adjust tasks and responsibilities.

Established procedures for staffing requirement assessment exist within public administration, described in organisational handbooks for the federal government and local authorities. The Federal Court of Audit has additionally set out requirements to be taken into account in requirement assessment. These procedures can also be applied to leadership positions and provide a robust basis for not leaving succession needs to chance.

I describe these connections in more detail in Chapter 3 of my book Personalmanagement in der öffentlichen Verwaltung, where staff planning and staffing requirement assessment are placed at the starting point of the entire employee lifecycle.

What administrations can do now

Succession planning starts well before the day a resignation is handed in, with a clear view of the age structure within one’s own organisation. Anyone who knows which leadership posts will become vacant through retirement in the next three to five years can identify suitable staff in good time, develop them in a targeted way, and so prevent an important position from remaining unfilled for months or having to be bridged with a stopgap solution.