Smarter leadership: Advantages and best practices for succession planning

Raj Syal is senior executive vice president and chief human resources officer at Huntington Bank, which has more than 25,000 employees and total assets of $188.5 billion. He explained that the Columbus, Ohio–based bank instituted a talent management practice in 2017 designed to optimize high-potential succession talent. “We want to be sure we go through our organization from top to bottom looking for our highest-potential talent and where the succession plans could begin,” Syal said.

Under the leadership of Chief Talent Officer Nichole Kneedler, the program focuses on three key areas: talent acquisition, talent management and talent development. Kneedler oversees succession plans, including for the CEO.

Kneedler and Syal spoke in late 2023 to BAI contributing editor Edmund Lawler about the bank’s approach to succession planning.

What are some best practices for identifying and nurturing potential leaders in the financial services industry?

Syal: We’ve deployed best practices like first determining where we actually have a gap. What are we trying to solve for? Where do we have a need or a deficiency? Then, we look within our organization for a match. For example, we may need someone who is great with project management. Who in our inventory is strong from a project management skills perspective? We can identify that because Workday, our HRIS platform, catalogs our employees’ desires for career advancement and their skill sets. We then talk to our business leaders and assess talent using a variety of assessment tools. Ultimately, we create a match-up. But we always make sure we are first looking within our organization.

Kneedler: Nurturing potential leaders requires taking smart, purposeful risks on internal talent. We don’t need to check every single box on every single skill in a role. We need to assume some calculated risk within internal talent so that we can give them opportunities to grow and build their careers.

How can financial services organizations support a candidate who has been identified as someone who can advance through the ranks?

Syal: It’s about understanding what our colleagues want, and making sure their career advancement needs are realistic. Sometimes that self-awareness is important. We can then have honest conversations to help them understand their full potential and how we can help them get there.

Kneedler: Think of the old standard of the 3E’s: education, exposure and experience. But as our expectations change as an organization and we look differently at talent, we look more to skills development and the skills they need to develop. This way, education is very purposeful and results-oriented.

What traits should banks and credit unions look for in candidates identified as capable of advancing to a leadership role?

Syal: Intellectual curiosity is number one here. Having people who are interested in looking around corners, asking questions and being curious beyond the task at hand is critical. Particularly today, given the regulatory environment, we need great communicators—people who are proactively sounding out problems and looking for resolutions and who have attention to detail. We look for individuals who are curious about work they are not necessarily directly involved with but who ask, where is this work going? How is this contributing? They can recognize that their role is very important in the end result. Their attention to detail in doing quality work and having the time to do quality work is essential.

Kneedler: I would add learning agility, which sounds a lot like intellectual curiosity. It is the skill to face something challenging and understand how to learn about it and apply your skills in a different way.

What are some of the biggest succession planning challenges currently facing the financial services industry?

Syal: There’s a bit of a knowledge drain. More people are leaving the workforce for a variety of reasons. But replacing their skill sets with that same level of experience is creating a gap. The second factor is just a talent shortage.

Kneedler: The retirement piece has been underway for a while. The pandemic only exacerbated it. We already had an aging workforce, but a lot more people decided they would step out earlier than planned because of the pandemic. Access to younger talent that was ready to replace retiring talent was also affected by the pandemic, as it put some people on a development hiatus.

What is the payoff for a successful succession planning program?

Syal: There are multiple payoffs. First, engagement levels go way up. You become an individual’s employer of choice and the best place they will ever work. Second, employees recognize we’re investing in them, and they sense we truly care about their growth and development. Third, they get to achieve some career milestones in learning and experiences that they would not otherwise have without a well-honed succession plan. Lastly, a succession planning program helps the bank tremendously in building a pipeline of talent that can assume more responsibility, bring new ideas and grow with the company. We are proud of the talent organization we have created and the people who have fostered high-potential, high-performing talent.

Kneedler: Succession planning drives business results for the bank.

Raj Syal is Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at Huntington Bank.

Nichole Kneedler is Chief Talent Officer at Huntington Bank.

Edmund Lawler is a contributing writer at BAI.

Explore more key topics about strengthening and supporting banking talent in the BAI Executive Report, “Priorities in talent and professional development.”