Succession Planning

Robin Field-Smith, a companion of the Chartered Institute of Marketing talks about the importance of training your staff with succession planning in mind.


Robin Field-Smith has well over 30 years experience working as a senior director and HR professional in large, complex, regulated organisations like the Army and the police. His specialist areas are in developing and improving workforce capability, productivity and diversity, through organisational and cultural change. He is a Companion of CMI, a Chartered Fellow of CIPD, and holds a Certificate of Company Direction from IoD.


Specific skills and experience


* holding organisations and individuals to account through inspection
* communicating vision to workforce and partners, to achieve agreed outcomes
* championing the needs and benefits of change, organisational and cultural
* designing and ensuring workforce reform
* adapting commercial productivity principles to public sector
* articulating business case for mainstreaming diversity
* published over 60 inspection reports



Recent achievements


* changed police HR function from transactional (cost) to transformational (investment) and achieved increase in police HR Directors at main board level from 5% to 50%
* introduced costing of all police training (£1bn spend)
* ensured equalities compliance and diversity mainstreaming within policing delivery
* led major reviews of police initial, diversity and officer safety training
* assisted ALI with first ever external inspection of armed forces training
* brought Central Police Training and Development Authority (new NDPB 2002) from poor to good performance
* facilitated the introduction of appraisal for Chief Constables
* negotiated Defence Accreditation model with HE, FE and professional bodies
* led the Army's quest to become an Investor in People