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Succession Planning

The Beauty of Simplicity: Succession Planning at Avon

Kellye Whitney

In early 2006, Avon began a major company turnaround. The restructuring process involved significant “delayering” of the 120-year-old beauty company — 15 layers of management dropped to eight, and about 25 percent of its vice presidents and 25 percent of its directors were released (nearly 5,000 employees companywide).

“It was a pretty fundamental change, and it causes you to ask, ‘Who’s still here? What jobs do they want to move into?’ It was also important to give people some insight into what their careers would be,” said Marc Effron, vice president of talent management. “We gave them a whack on the head with the delayering process, so it was important to follow up with, ‘Here’s what we see happening going forward with your career in the organization.’

Effron said Avon didn’t have the type of talent processes that would attract new talent or motivate employees to make the turnaround effective.

For instance, succession planning typically had been done in the executive suite — senior management identified a need or gap and filled it, and there was little forethought as far as, “In four years, we know we’re going to need 15 new general managers. Where are they going to come from?”

Effron and his team subsequently examined every talent practice in the company, and using Avon’s one-page talent management philosophy as a model, re-created them all with two major guidelines: simplicity and effectiveness. The process had to be simple yet robust and consistently repeatable for about 40,000 global associates.

“We do that not by playing around with fonts and margins but by saying, ‘What is the core goal we’re trying to achieve here?’” Effron said. “For example, in succession planning, what we’re really trying to figure out is, do we have the talent we need to meet our business goals, and what is the quality and depth of that talent? What’s the least amount of paper, the fewest conversations we could possibly have that would get us to an outcome that we feel is valid and provides us with good-quality information?”

Avon rebuilt its succession planning process sans a lot of the paper or a number of assessments that Effron said had little to do with the talent decisions being made. Before the turnaround, the company’s succession planning efforts were not fact-based.

Post-turnaround, facts such as employee engagement scores play a key role in the process, and it’s easier to answer questions such as, “Are succession candidates creating a team that’s engaged?” and “What is their true level of performance in challenging environments?”
Eliminating unnecessary information such as profile sheets and other paperwork also helped to clarify key definitions.

“Previously, it wasn’t clear what it meant when someone was high-potential,” Effron said. “Now, we’re very clear that high-potential means you can move two levels in our organization over the course of six years. There’s consistency around the globe, so when someone’s called a high potential in one region, that means the same thing as a high potential in another region.

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