Michelle Bennett is the People Manager, Americas, for GHD, Inc., www.ghd.com a global engineering, architecture and environmental consulting company. Ms. Bennett provides oversight and HR responsibility for the 1,100 GHD employees located in multiple offices throughout Canada, Chile and the United States. She recently was a speaker at the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) Synergy Roundtable in Alexandria, VA. HR Advisors Group caught up with her to have her share some thoughts on succession planning and leadership development.
Can you give us your ‘big picture’ thoughts on succession planning and leadership development in the industry as the whole?
A large number of organizations today find that their senior leadership is comprised of the Baby Boomer generation. Organizations are beginning to see a real need to share knowledge, develop future leaders and have succession planning in place prior to the exit of the Baby Boomer generation from the workplace. In an effort to not only identify future leaders and extract the knowledge of current leadership, organizations must develop some type of integrated learning environment that merges the leadership pipeline with current senior leaders.
Succession planning really depends on an organization’s personal preferences. It can be as easy as an excel spreadsheet that identifies the leadership pipeline or as intensive as using occupational assessment tools to evaluate who should be in your pipeline. It doesn’t have to be complicated, but it’s critical to know who is in the pipeline, who is transitioning out, who needs to be transitioned in and what are the best ways to develop these individuals.
As far as leadership development, keep in mind that a good leadership is a very individualistic skill. In our business, someone who has strong technical skills or is great at business development might not be good in leadership positions. Sometimes we put people in the wrong positions because they have good “technical skills,” but poor leadership skills.
So what is leadership development? Is it external or internal training programs? Executive coaching? One-on-one mentoring? The answer is yes, to all of those programmatic tactics because it’s not a one size fits all approach. Again, this is where having good succession planning in place is important. Take a look at your pipeline and determine what leadership development training is needed for people 18-36 months out. For individuals with immediate leadership transition needs, maybe it’s one-on-one mentoring or executive coaching. Make sure to interview and involve the current leadership team and find out the goals and objectives of individual roles and positions. This can allow you to evaluate individuals in the pipeline and see who currently has the competencies and who needs greater training or development.
With such a large swath of senior leaders falling into that Baby Boomer generation with retirement on their minds in the next five to ten years, are organizations prepared for or thinking about this?
Personally, I think this topic is on most HR professionals’ minds. However, even though everybody sees it as important, we are lagging behind on ramping people up to be the next emerging leaders or identifying these leaders. It is understood that it’s a priority, but overall, we lack having the necessary tools in place to do it. Typically I find that the hardest part is having discussions with an organization’s senior leadership asking them what their transition plans are and ascertaining how we extract their knowledge before they leave.
Why is this so difficult?
These types of conversations are hard because often there is a lot of legacy baggage within organizations. Most of those individuals are in senior roles. You’re an HR Director approaching a CEO or COO and saying ‘when are you going to retire?’ It’s a challenging conversation to have because sometimes people get defensive and think you’re pushing them out. It’s great for senior leaders to take an initiative and tell us ‘this is my exit strategy over the next few years,’ but more often than not they don’t. Often there isn’t a plan in place to extract all their collective knowledge from 30 or 40 years of experience before they leave. This is extremely valuable knowledge that can be shared for the greater good of the organization.
Also, there can be controversy once an emerging leader is identified. The question then becomes, ‘do we tell the person that they are an emerging leader?” How do you begin to ramp someone up for the next position when they may not know they have been identified as a potential next leader? How do you push knowledge to the emerging leader? These situations are driven by the culture of the organization and often it’s up to HR to drive these conversations.
Have you found a common vehicle through which senior leaders like to share their knowledge?
There really isn’t a common way to share knowledge. Some leaders are really open to mentoring, but that doesn’t work for everyone and others take different avenues or different approaches. Sometimes it’s just having that individual share information on a project, but not in a mentoring form. Other things we’ve done with some senior leaders is to have them go to a part time status and play an advisory role to the organization. But, I really feel that mentoring is the best route.
Where is GHD in this process and what are some of the challenges you have personally encountered?
For us this process is still changing. We are in the infancy stages and only in our first year in addressing these issues. It’s been a slow process because we want people to come on the journey with us. We’re educating the senior leadership team on what a solid succession plan is like, as well as educating and developing our emerging leaders. Luckily, our leaders are recognizing that this is important.
One of the challenges we have had was defining succession planning. Succession planning is not replacement planning, although some people view it as that, but rather it’s an ongoing continuum that we should be developing emerging leaders and existing leaders together. The other hurdle we face, and are still overcoming, involves the process by which people are being asked to identify who the next leaders are in line for their role. This becomes a challenge because everyone has their own opinion or perception on who is the next emerging leader. It’s difficult to sift through those opinions, and then we have to ask ourselves if we tell those individuals that they are earmarked as a potential leader.
How do you sift through those individual opinions to target the most appropriate potential leaders?
We have an access database which our leadership members go into and identify their recommended next leaders. The information is then extracted and we have a calibration meeting with our operating center leaders and our entire senior leadership team. The identified leaders are put on a white board and collectively we place them in a four box matrix that evaluates the candidates potential and their performance. These calibration meetings assist us in flushing out those details and populating our leadership pipeline with the most appropriate candidates.
Any final thoughts or recommendations?
Open dialogue is key. By involving senior leadership, the way is smoothed for a lot of the bumps in the road that you might encounter later on in the process. My recommendation is that HR should have one-on-one conversations with the president and CEO and get their buy in on creating an integrated development plan and solid succession plan first, then go to other senior leadership and so on through the organization. By involving them in the planning of this program, when it comes time to have that difficult conversation with a senior leader about their personal exit strategy, they aren’t caught off guard and they understand what you’re trying to accomplish by this conversation.
Lastly, we’ve laid the framework for identifying the need for succession planning and leadership development within our organization, now the next phase is to implement. Nothing is ever permanent and the most successful HR practitioners are fluid and always ready to change because what works now, may not work tomorrow. The implementation is the critical piece for the future of our organization, so obviously there’s still work to do.
