How Can We Get A Better Handle On Workforce Planning?

[ANNOUNCER]: Breaking down everyday workplace issues and diagnosing the hidden sickness, not just the obvious symptom. Our hosts, James and Coby.

[COBY]: Did we lose a patient?

[JAMES]: No, that’s just my lunch.

[COBY]: Hey, thanks for joining us. I’m Coby, he’s James. And let’s get started with the statement. First, I want to let everybody know that this coming September, we’re going to be launching a quarterly newsletter that kind of builds on some of the ideas and information from the podcast. So there’ll be, you know, we’ll add, some infographics, some cool stats, some information about upcoming episodes, and hopefully a great chance for people to kind of engage with us more because we love engaging with, with our podcast listeners. So, we’re going to put a link into our show notes for a short little signup forum. So please, if this would be even remotely interesting to you, feel free to click on that and add your name to it. And we’re hoping to kind of be able to build more sense of community amongst our podcast listeners by kind of having more opportunities to engage with them. So we’ll be probably mentioning this over the next few episodes as kind of a reminder and probably leave the link in our show notes, kind of for the seeable future, but make sure you check it out. With that being said, now let’s get started with the question, how can we get a better handle on workforce planning?

[JAMES]: Yeah, this is going to be a fun one, because workforce planning can be this complex maze of just analyzing, forecasting, planning, workforce supply and demand, ah, assessing gaps, determining what talent management initiatives are needed, to make sure that you’ve got the right people with right skills in the right places at the right time, all in order for the organization to fulfill its mandate. There’s a lot that can go into workforce planning. for the purposes of our discussion, though, I think I really want to focus on the second half of the description, which is how do you determine what talent management initiatives are needed to ensure that the organization has the right people with the right skills in the right place at the right time that’s going to allow for that organization to actually accomplish what it’s designed to accomplish. and then to achieve this, I think there’s really two things that I think would be helpful to discuss. from a, you know, what are some workforce planning tools that can actually be used to help ensure the organization has those, you know, that laundry list of right skills, blah, blah, blah. And what is a talent management initiative that supports workforce planning?

[COBY]: Yeah, because I think workforce planning is one of those things that people tend to see kind of in, like, the. The packages of, you know, HR strategy, or, you know, or they are. HR professionals learned about it during their education, but haven’t actually done a whole lot with it in their work. Because the sad thing is, again, a lot of the companies that we talk to, the vast majority that we talk to that are kind of in, like, you know, have, like, 500 employees or less. This is something that gets, briefly mentioned in, like, you know, high level conversations. But. But it’s very rarely a, strategic priority. Kind of, you know, you know, for year to year planning, it usually comes up.

[JAMES]: Once they have a major gap in their workforce needs, and then they go, oh, yeah, we need to do workforce planning.

[COBY]: Yeah, yeah. And sometimes it’s a reaction to kind of, again, like I say, kind of a problem that comes up, and I immediately, people will look for, like, you know, like, software solutions. Cause that’s kind of, when you look up workforce planning, it’s usually a lot of, like, the traditional everything.

[JAMES]: Well, they can certainly help with the analysis and, forecasting pieces. Cause, and let’s be clear, there are workforce, planning professionals, who are far more talented and skilled and knowledgeable on this subject than we are. And, to you, we apologize to listen to us. you can just jump to the, as Coby said, just sign up for the newsletter, and join us next time, or just continue to listen to us ramble. It’s all good.

[COBY]: Because I think, too, is that I think the reason why there’s not as much of, again, in the 500, again, the 50 to 500 is kind of where that kind of poor sweet spot tends to kind of be. And I think the reason for it not being as prominent there as it should be kind of has to do with the almost like, the reactionary nature of kind of growth and talent management in those sections where everything is like, you know, oh, we didn’t, you know, we. We hit the. We hit a big growth surge, and we weren’t prepared for it. So we have to react to it or, like, you know, or we’re having trouble with talent retention, so we’re constantly in a reactive phase. And, I mean, I don’t want to say, well, you want to solve your reaction problem? Workforce planning is the answer, but there is a lot of benefit coming from workforce planning that can help alleviate a lot of the symptoms that end up resulting with a lot of retention issues.

[JAMES]: Well, and part of it is also, I mean, as you start getting into the larger structures, you have more opportunity for or very specialized departments and skill sets and sub departments within your HR responsibilities. Usually in this, you know, 500 or fewer employees, you probably have an HR team, but you don’t have deep specializations, you don’t have a total rewards team, you don’t have a workforce planning team. Right. So everybody’s kind of carrying a lot of different hats, which can be extremely chaotic. We, we see you, we hear you, we feel for you. We can’t change it for you.

[COBY]: Yeah. But you know, the, a lot of it with kind of that piece is that the workforce planning? I think why it often gets kind of shuffled off to the side is because I think that again, the common understanding, especially outside the kind of the HR realm, is like, well, it’s planning for our workforce. And that requires like, you know, a.

[JAMES]: Lot of, usually it’s replacement planning. If it’s thought of in a half baked plan, it’s replacement planning of, well, we know that we generally lose, you know, 18% of our workforce year over year. So we need to make sure that we are replacing 18% of our workforce year over year. And that’s where the workforce planning strategy kind of starts and stops.

[COBY]: Yeah, yeah. And I think that with a, the idea of trying to remove or try to move away from the talent management and workforce kind of like strategies in general, as being reactionary towards being intentional is part of it, is kind of moving into the idea of let’s think ahead about our growth. Let’s take some strategic intent in where we think we need to get to and trying to keep in mind this is something that needs to be done with some expertise involved and some real well thought out, situations. It’s tough when you’re in an organization, especially when you’re in HR department, that is very reactionary. Going back to our episode about what does HR stand for? And the highly reactive HR departments have a really hard time with these kind of planning processes because they’re just trying to keep the fires kind of at a minimum every day. So it does require a little bit of a mental shift away from that. We’re all about reaction to, we’re all about strategic intent.

[JAMES]: But if it does require leadership, it requires leadership to be on board with the, you know, to move from a reactionary standpoint to let’s actually look at this from a strategic standpoint. But it also has a very clear connection to bottom, line. If you’re going through any type, let’s pray and hope that you’re going through some growth. Right. There’s at least a growth strategy in your organization for how are we going to improve our market penetration, whatever that m strategy may be, you’re going to require, skilled people in the right places, in the right roles at the right time in order to achieve that. And that can be the linkage to why we actually need to start looking at this from a more intentional strategic standpoint rather than a replacement theory.

[COBY]: Yeah. And going back to, again, I’m going to reference in a past episode, a recent episode we did on the Technical Founder Paradox, about the idea of, when everything rests on the shoulders of the owner founders, and then they grow to a point where they’re not able, where their skill sets are not scaling or not evolving with the expectations and role and the roles that they have to carry to move to the next level. This is when workforce planning should be a major component of that, because it’s also about the idea of what does the CEO need to be in three years from now? Not just what are the foundational bottom line, or, you know, like, you know, the frontline staff, but what does all people need to be? Because it’s about, you know, do we evolve the skills existing, the existing skills and the existing people? Are we about, you know, trying to bring in kind of newer ideas, newer talent? Are there new positions we have to create that we get nobody, you know, able to do it, that, we can upskill? These are hard questions that we need to answer, but I, a lot of it going back to, again, the technical founder paradox, and making sure that you, that your leadership team, and if you’re listening to this as an owner or founder, that your, the evolution of your job is now holding back the growth of the organization. So this might be a very helpful conversation to anybody who might be dealing with a technical founder paradox.

[JAMES]: Well, and you’re right in that this is important at every level of the organization and hierarchy, but a mismatch in skills at the leadership level can derail your momentum and growth. Ah, I mean, the example that always kind of comes back to me is the, why we’ve shared it before. the team of friends who started a business right out of college, and they were the senior leadership team, and they grew the company together. None, of them really having any experience in management or leadership before all technical experts in how to build their product. This was a big challenge for them to overcome in identifying that just being the founders of the company is not necessarily enough to ensure that you have the skills to grow the company and doing this type of workforce planning of, what, ah, we’re not singling out any individual position or person. We’re looking at the organization to ensure, where are we going? What is our, goal over the next three to five years? How have we articulated that? How are we going to get there from an external scalability standpoint, but then linking that to, do we actually have, what skills are required to get us there? And do we have those skills in house? Do we have them in our existing leadership team? If we don’t, how do we actually accommodate that? And I think that’s where I’d like to kind of shift our conversation to. How do we identify those pieces? What are some strategies that we can use, in that, and where can we actually pull some good ideas around? What initiatives can we start building in our organizations to ensure that we have a bit of a, if not cushion, then at least a little bit of security, knowing that we have the skills and people in the right places to ensure that we can actually continue to grow?

[COBY]: Yeah, no, I think that’s where we should definitely be focusing on. Okay, so we said, there’s a problem. You might be spears in this problem. So now we’re going to say, okay, here’s how you can get out of it. Not to say, well, you’re screwed, so good luck. here’s a problem.

[JAMES]: Go deal with it.

[COBY]: So you kind of mentioned that there’s two things that, would be beneficial to that, but I think that within the two things that you mentioned in your intro, I think there’s actually three considerations that fall within those that probably would be helpful. The idea around tools and some ideas around processes. so I think the three considerations we’ll get into, I’ll just introduce them quickly, and then we’ll jump into them one by one. these, can be helpful things in order for, again, the organization to, again, have that more strategic approach, that more proactive planning ahead to putting some things into place that you might not have thought about, or that might, again, like you say, kind of build that framework or the guide rails to kind of so you know, you’re not spinning out of control. You’ve got some security in mind, that there are some things that you can do, things you can lean on to make sure that you know that you’re moving out of reactionary into the kind of the strategic, intent. So the first consideration we want to talk about is what we call a strength based strategy. Now, the one thing that we hear a lot and is kind of the cornerstone of a lot of very traditional kind of management, consulting and organizational process stuff is the idea of right people in the right seats. And that’s, you know, and there’s a lot of value to that. But the idea of the strength based strategy is kind of having a bit of a shift towards not the right people in the right seats, but the right strengths in the right seats. And we’ll tell you, we’ll get into what that means in a minute or two. But the second consideration we want to talk about is temporary talent that sometimes there are some interesting options about that are probably more and more common, kind of as the workforce has evolving around things like fractional leadership, acting executives, interim leadership, those types of things can be really helpful to kind of, especially when you’re trying to, like, you know, like, patch, fill some gaps in your organization.

[JAMES]: Yeah.

[COBY]: And then the third consideration is a big one, which is about succession plan and the idea about, like, you know, like, upskilling, creating the talent ladders, molding people to fill important roles in a year or two down the road. So those three things, I think, will be three really helpful ideas that will be, again, especially for, again, a 50 to 500 person, business. These are going to be three great things to really consider. So we’ll just dig into those one by one. so why don’t we get started off James with the strength based strategy?

[JAMES]: Yeah. So we’ve talked about, strength based teams, previously, and this is a big piece for us. what we’re really looking at here is the difference between, do you want a team of generalists, where everybody has a very similar skillset, versus having a team of specialists, where each person’s kind of playing to a unique strength, and you have complementary skill sets and strengths amongst the rest of the team. So, obviously, we are strong proponents of the idea of taking that strengths based approach. We see it, ah, time and time again in our work as we are, coaching organizations and leaders and teams to really move towards that strength based approach. This is what has allowed so many to become very high performing, productive teams, and allowing people to actually kind of the byproduct of this also ends up being, general, better sense of fulfillment in what people are doing because they’re playing to their more natural strengths. So this relates specifically to workforce planning, because you have to have the right skills in place. You need to have people who are playing to their strengths and playing to their strengths within a role that really requires that having somebody play to their strength, if they’re, very, administrative, focused, and that is an absolute core strength that they have, and they can, produce, that type of work in very short order with minimal time and effort and energy. But the role that they’re actually in, that’s not the, skill set that’s actually needed in that position, then you’ve got that misalignment. So it’s not. It’s the strength and the skill, within the role that they are performing to ensure that they can actually reach the, help the organization reach their mandate and their goals.

[COBY]: Yeah, so we, in a previous episode we did this season, I think it was the episode about should we be hiring for fit. We broke down the idea of, like, a, team, a well rounded team versus a team of well rounded individuals.

[JAMES]: Right.

[COBY]: Because a lot of organizations are looking at kind of almost like individual people. Kind of like, you know, carrying kind of. Kind of doing all aspects of. Of the job, kind of like, you know, and then being able to kind of stand alone. Stand alone by themselves and kind of like, you know, getting things accomplished, which is a pretty common thing in a lot of different companies, a lot of different positions. But there’s value to that. But there’s also the idea of having a well rounded team where instead of everyone having to. Having the same unique, diverse spectrum of skill sets to accomplish all the tasks of the job themselves, you have people that have specialized skill sets, and, you know, they do kind of like, you know, the majority of their day are doing things that they’re extremely good at. And their skill sets that are really good at complement another person’s skillset. So almost like they kind of pass the work on where person a does, you know, something they’re very, very good at and accomplishes, you know, a big chunk of the project or pieces of the pie, and then, they pass it on to person b, who does different stuff that they’re extremely, extremely good at. And that idea of a complimentary, well rounded team can be a very, very high performing, and it can be a very satisfying role. When you’re hired to do a job that, you know, 80% of your job are things that you’re extremely skilled at, it can be. It can be very satisfying, but it also allows you to, you know, not having to find, you know, these perfectly, these are unicorns that can do all aspects of the job at an extremely high level, and they’d have no weaknesses, and everything’s a strength, and, you know, those kind of things which are really, you know, they’re. They may be out there, but we don’t really see them. And if they’re out there, they’re really hard to.

[JAMES]: Well, and if they’re out there and you’re trying to attract them, you’re going to be paying through the nose to bring them into your organization because everybody’s looking for them.

[COBY]: Exactly. So the idea of trying to re understand the roles and the role lineation and the kind of how your teams cooperate can be a very powerful way to, again, address workforce planning, because the idea of a strength based strategy, we want to create a well rounded team and not just have to constantly chase unicorns that are well rounded individuals. And the tool that we talked about in that episode about should we be hiring for fit was our spectrum program.

[JAMES]: Yeah. And what’s nice about this, and so you, you touched on role delineation, and I think that’s important because strength based teams can. There’s going to be differing, varying degrees to which you are going to be able to implement, this strength based approach. You can always take a strength based approach to virtually any team that we’ve encountered. The how much you’re able to shift, roles will depend on, what the actual nature of the jobs are themselves. but what’s important, I’m going to share the disclaimer that I always have to share every time we, deliver this program. This is not an excuse to dump the work that you don’t like onto somebody else. It’s about playing to your strengths and allowing others to play to theirs and hope. And, when we do this, we often naturally allow ourselves to work on roles, on work that is more naturally attuned to what we enjoy doing and allows others to do the work that they are more naturally inclined towards. And by a byproduct of that is we have less of the work that just drains us. But please don’t take this as an excuse to say, well, I’m only going to do this work from now on because this is what makes me happy. And, you peons can take, all the grunt work and, you know, sit in the mud.

[COBY]: That alleviates the strategy part of the strength based strategy.

[JAMES]: Yes. But I just. I have to put it out there because, although I don’t think that is how most people, approach this conversation, I don’t want there to be room for misunderstanding with that, with our intent.

[COBY]: Yeah. Because whenever we talk about our spectrum program, that disclaimer is often very helpful. So just kind of just gonna give a quick summary of the spectrum program. So, spectrum can be used, as a workforce planning tool to help identify skills and attributes that we need to complement existing team members and to be prepared to fill gaps and intentionally put the right strengths in the right place. So, in the program, there’s a psychometric that kind of helps you identify what are the kind of roles in a team that you’re naturally more inclined to be good at and actually more inclined to enjoy. And then it’s the idea of saying that if your skill set, let’s say it’s very administrative focused, like I mentioned earlier, you really like the kind of the task lists and organization and those kind of pieces that if the job requires a portion of that, but also requires a lot of work, with, like, you know, people and various and, a lot of social connection and stuff like that, then partnering someone who’s good at the administrative pieces, as we call in the program a minder, and partnering them with, a people focused person, which we call a binder, to kind of help realize, you know, that this kind of cooperative approach to the work could allow both people to perform higher, higher, quality work that they’re doing things that they’re good at and complement each other. And this is something that. And this is something that can be a really helpful framework for when you’re trying to think about, okay, strength based. Sounds good, but how do I use this to plan for my work, my m workforce planning? Well, the program itself can be very, very great. Self awareness, learning about people’s skills and learning about the things that you’re nationally inclined to do and helping identify kind of inventory and kind of who you have around you.

[JAMES]: Yeah.

[COBY]: And we did. So there’s a great example of us doing this with kind of, a nonprofit going through a merger these years back, where these two nonprofits that work really closely together for a long time, they were emerging and had this kind of larger, service area that they had to deliver on, and they knew each other. The organization’s been working together for a long time, and they’re both kind of fairly large, but a lot of the staff knew each other. The, amalgamating of the people wasn’t as much of an issue because a lot of them knew each other and a lot of them got along, but there was really a lot of uncertainty about, okay, how do we functionally task, bring people together to actually deliver higher quality services?

[JAMES]: Well, there was overlap in the jobs. You had two organizations delivering very similar levels of similar types of supports with similar types of roles, bringing that together into one, I mean, part of. I mean, if anybody’s gone through merger, ah, acquisition, we lost people, in the process, right? So there were roles that needed to be filled. There were roles that were duplicated. There were, skill sets that were very, very similar, you know, and uncertainty from people of, well, am I going to have my job or am I going to be moved into a different job? So this type of planning tool to, I mean, before you can plan, you need to inventory. You need to know what you have at your disposal to be able to plan with. And that’s one of the strengths of the spectrum program, is providing you with an inventory of the skills and preferences of your team members. And then being able. What was so fitting with this particular, client or set of clients was how, because they were going through this merger upheaval process, and there were vacant positions and there were shuffling. There was the opportunity to actually look at, okay, here are the skills that we have. Here are the outcomes that we’re trying to achieve. Let’s now take a slightly different look at how do we arrange our work in a way that capitalizes on the skills and the strengths that we have at our disposal now that we know how to use them. Been a really cool way of kind of shifting that narrative of, well, we don’t need three people who all do the same thing. What we need is this minute, whatever the outcome is, we have this many people, and we’re allowing them to play to their strengths. We’re allowing people to, work on projects that they find fulfilling. And yes, there’s always still part of your job that you’re not going to enjoy. You don’t get to dump it on somebody else, blah, blah, blah. Disclaimer, disclaimer. But it’s been. It’s. It was really satisfying, from my perspective, to watch the shift happen as people went from uncertainty of what is my job going to be to starting to identify their strengths and recognizing that, oh, holy crap, I’m actually going to be able to do more of the stuff that I enjoy with this new approach.

[COBY]: Well, and what’s cool is, like, sometimes this happens a lot in nonprofits that are kind of, funded, annually to deliver a lot of core. A lot of core activities is that sometimes you get people that were hired for one job, that job got closed, but another job was core fund and opened up, and they jumped into it. They may not have the interest or skills to do it, but, but to avoid the layoff they took the job. So you see, so it’s not an uncommon thing for people to kind of be doing a job that they find, you know, that takes a lot, that they can do. I mean, let’s be clear. They can do the job, but it takes a lot more effort and energy to achieve the outcomes than it would in a different job that they were more inclined and had more natural skill sets to. So looking at this, this full inventory, what was cool about it was that the leadership of both organizations kind of got a fresh perspective of, okay, well, even though this person’s been doing this job for three years, they’re actually, you know, their skill sets are actually much more in line to do a different job. So kind of being able to kind of have a fresh take on everybody. And again, and this wasn’t saying, you know, well, because you scored this, this is your job from now on. It was. It was a strategic approach to opening up dialogue and looking at, can we do this whole thing? We’re changing anyway, can we do the whole thing better? And then can we plan for the vacancies around what skill sets we need? Right. If we have a lot of really people focused binders like I mentioned before, then do we need to hire more of the administrative focused minders to kind of come in to help flesh out that skill set of those teams or some of the other programs around, like, you know, people that find opportunities, the finders around, like, you know, grants and stuff like that, or the people that are more of the grinders that are really about kind of like the filling out, the documents and applications and a lot of these things about, no, having a more. Again, the idea of that well rounded team, instead of putting each person on their own island and expecting them just to be a perfectly well rounded individual.

[JAMES]: Yeah. So, again, from a workforce planning perspective, this type of strategy, it’s not going to identify what you need in your organization to achieve your outcomes. but it is going to, once you know what you’re trying to achieve and what you need to get there, it’s going to help you inventory your staff, your team members, your employees, to recognize, okay, we know what we are trying to accomplish. Let’s see what we have. And how can we, again, put the right people in the right seats with the right skills at the right time in order to help the organization achieve its mandate? That’s what we are trying to do with workforce planning.

[COBY]: Yeah, that’s great. All right, so let’s move on to the second consideration around temporary talent.

[JAMES]: Okay.

[COBY]: So this is something that, is something that’s not a new thing by any church’s imagination, but not something that comes up as much in workforce planning as it probably should. So the three kind of different types of temporary talent that I think we should talk about are fractional leadership, acting executives, and interim interventions.

[JAMES]: Yeah. And these are all, I mean, you can tell, right, just from the titles of them. These are really geared towards what do you do when you have gaps in your leadership or management teams? How do you fill those key positions quickly, effectively, in a way that’s going to actually help move the organization forward?

[COBY]: Yeah, yeah. And I mean, because a lot of times we’re talking about the companies that are in the middle of kind of a big growth stage. Again, when you kind of hit, you kind of hit a bit of a, you kind of hit a bit of a, ah, benchmark, wherever. Again, the people that have been carrying like a whole department portfolio by themselves now have to be to again, jump to the next level. To level up. You really need to have a much more fleshed out skillset. You could have somebody that’s in charge of finances, that’s really their job while you’re small, is around billing and invoicing and those kinds of things. But then we start moving into, you know, bigger investments and bigger collections. You might need to move into some, into more of a CFO role rather than someone who’s just managing your finances. Right. Or your marketing goes from just like from being a social media and kind of like, you know, advertising kind of role. almost like an account manager, just to like it, to like a CMO. Right. Like there’s, there’s.

[JAMES]: Which is more strategic, more, you know, rather than looking at the individual activities that are going to accomplish the outcomes, it’s looking at the strategic intent and the processes that we need to build and put in place in order to get there. Those are, I mean, it’s not saying that a person who does one can’t do the other, but it’s recognizing that they don’t always go hand in hand. And honestly, where we see this the most is with the president and CEO.

[COBY]: Yeah.

[JAMES]: because as a founder, nine times out of ten, the founder is somebody with a deep technical understanding of the, of what makes business tick, of the product that they’ve built, the service that they provide. And they know that intimately.

[JAMES]: As the company grows, your job as the CEO is not to be doing the work. Your job is to be the visionary, the trailblazer. The person who is setting the path and leading the organization forward. And we see it, far too common that the CEO, whether it’s from a lack, of comfort with their new responsibility, tend to get into the weeds and micromanage and cause problems because they are trying to hang on to what they’re comfortable with rather than what they actually need to be doing now.

[COBY]: Yeah, I mean, going back to the technical founder paradox, which you mentioned earlier.

[JAMES]: Absolutely.

[COBY]: Because like one of the first. So talking about fractional leadership, the idea of bringing in a fully equipped, like, executive level, skill set on a part time basis to kind of help build and build up and flesh out and lead a more strategic role.

[JAMES]: Let’s be a little more intentional with our language, because not part time employee, more of a contract basis. Typically, these are professionals with years of experience who are doing this for multiple clients, and providing your organization with x number of hours per month of their expertise.

[COBY]: Right. Hired, hired by retainer.

[JAMES]: It is part time in terms of it, not. Yeah, but I just wanted to provide that clarity.

[COBY]: Absolutely. Because, like, a really good first. so again, in the situation you talked about, where, you know, the founder needs to, or the owner needs to start working on the business, not in the business. A really good option to consider for workforce planning is a fractional, chief operating officer, someone that could take over the inward focus look and kind of help structure things, while the CEO could start looking externally and start looking about growing the business and that sort of thing to it.

[JAMES]: Yeah, you’re right. That would be a great first, fractional support to bring in.

[COBY]: Absolutely. Because, again, and these are things that are really helpful, because, again, a new growing company might not be able to afford a full, high level executive full time. But a fractional one could be someone that could help, again, build capacity, start or reorganize things so that the company could stabilize enough to hire someone full time to replace the fractional executive. So it really is a good, again, the idea of the temporary talent. Now, if you move from the c suite, kind of down to middle management, another great thing to consider is the idea of the acting executive. And this is about having we have a manager, often one of the challenge, or we have a middlemander. Sometimes they have a hard time moving up because there often is a lot of expectation, on them that, that if you replace those people, then it creates too much of a void to kind of make, to make the kind of frontline operations work. So kind of people often get stuck in that middle level piece but acting exec, acting executive roles, can be about if, James, you’re the manager and I work beneath you, and I’m kind of a senior person that works beneath you, giving someone, like, giving me the opportunity to become an acting executive to be your placement. So if you take vacation, then it’s just written into policy. I step into your role with limited, authority, temporary limited authority to be your designate. be able to kind of make sure that the ball doesn’t get dropped in your absence. And to, fill that gap in during a leadership absence can be a great way to kind of make sure that people are not so irreplaceable that they can’t take time off or they can’t, you know, or try out other positions or whatever like that. But having those kinds of acting executive kind of pieces in there, team leads that can step in temporarily, can be a powerful tool around trying to kind of plan and groom towards who’s going to be your future kind of core leaders.

[JAMES]: Yeah. And I like this approach for many reasons, not the least of which is I was very fortunate early in my career to be given these opportunities. Mm you know, I was fortunate to have managers who identified something in me in terms of, you know, this person has some leadership capability or something that we want to invest in. And I was given opportunities to, you know, managers on vacation. Okay, James, you’re in charge for two weeks. Great. It exposes you to, new levels of responsibilities within a fairly safe environment. It really ties in really nicely with what we’re going to be talking about, next, which is succession planning, which is a fundamental, core value that I think every business needs to engage in. But we’ll get there. but, yeah. The idea of the acting, role or really just having the foresight to recognize that stuff happens. People need to take breaks, people need to take vacations. How do we account for the work still being done when a person leaves? And that type of strategy can be really, really powerful, not only for the business, but for your employees, too.

[COBY]: Yeah. And it’s important to mention, too, that we’re talking about this being an intentional, like, planned, like an upskilling of the people. Not to say, all right, the manager’s little buddy is now in charge with no support or anything behind. Kind of unofficially, we’re saying that it’s almost like written in your standard operating procedure. When this person is out, this person who has received probably some leadership training, most coaching, has been prepared for the responsibility and authority to be granted to them. Is the, is the designate when that person’s absent. Like, we’ve seen this with municipalities. Like the CAO is away often. Like, the director of finance is the acting CEO in their absence. But it’s written right into the bylaws. So that’s something that we’re talking about. A very intentional, clear process, not just a casual, I’m just going to name that guy in charge while I’m gone. You’re in charge, buddy. Good luck. No.

[JAMES]: And what made it work in my situation was that my manager actually took the time to sit down with me and to bring me into conversations that I wouldn’t have otherwise been a part of, in order to expose me to some of the challenges that I would have faced when they were away. Right. Like, it is an intentional strategy for bringing, for, you know, investing in someone, to bring them along and develop their skills and their abilities.

[COBY]: Yeah, yeah. And then the third one I want to just kind of touch on briefly before we move on to succession planning is the idea of interim interventions. So sometimes we use that, we use the word like acting, like acting manager and interim manager interchangeably, but they’re actually not. An acting person is someone that’s temporarily been given limited authority, whereas an interim person has been giving a limited time and scope, but they have complete authority to deliver on a manual role. Yeah. So, like, I’ve worked a number of interim jobs where I was hired from outside to kind of come in, usually during a transition where I’ve been given full, authority, but I’ve been given a clear, limited, like, limited time and limited mandate to achieve. And often part of my expectation was to find my replacement of the permanent position to replace. And there’s a lot of power in that, too, because again, it’s the idea of bringing in somebody who, especially during a transition, has the skillset to manage that core piece, but, and then to hire somebody who doesn’t need to have that transitional experience, but can hand, but can sustain the job once transitions happen long term, there’s a lot of power in that, too. So this is why I think the idea around temporary talent, the fractional leadership, the acting executive, and the interim interventions can be great towards your workforce planning, knowing about growth stages, knowing towards, you know, in the next year or two, we might need an interim person, then we can hire a full time person or this or that. This gives you more options to consider instead of being feeling like you’re stuck, which is, I have to hire someone full time and whether we can afford it or not, and hopefully it’ll work out. There’s a lot more options you have available to you. You just have to kind of take a step back and rethink about what your future workforce planning would look like.

[JAMES]: You have to get this plan for your workforce.

[COBY]: Fair enough.

[JAMES]: I know.

[COBY]: Let’s move on to, consideration number three, succession planning. And this really is about making sure that there’s kind of a career path for people.

[JAMES]: And honestly, the succession planning to me, is such a important aspect of proper management that I see so often overlooked. It really, one of the things that really bothers me is how infrequently we, we as businesses, we as business owners, the collective we are, we really do not invest in our people the way that we should. This is for a whole bunch of reasons, you know, perspectives of, well, if what happens, I’m just going to train them and they’re going to leave and go somewhere else. Hear that type of mentality, quote it all of the time. And yeah, that can happen. The other worst thing that can happen is that you don’t train them and they stay. I mean, there’s famous quotes attributed with all of these things and I can’t remember them all right now. So I’m gonna..

[COBY]: I think it’s Richard Branson, but, yeah, but the idea though is that it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy when you don’t say, well, I’m not going to bother training them because they’re not going to stick around. Well, then they leave because they feel like there’s no future at the organization, so it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

[JAMES]: And one of the things that I really like as a comparative tool is talking about the similarities between the consumer market and the labor market. And I use this analogy very frequently, talking about a whole bunch of different things, whether we’re talking about branding or value propositions in both. The other thing that is so in the consumer market, it is a well established and proven fact that it is cheaper and easier to get an existing, customer to make a second purchase than it is to have somebody make that first purchase. I firmly, I don’t, there isn’t the same level of research involved here, but I do firmly believe that it is easier to invest in somebody and bring them along to fill a identified need in your organization than it will be to go out to the marketplace to find that exact skill set that you’re looking for and pay to bring it in. If you invest in people, early on and, you know, if you’ve done your workforce planning and you know, what skills and positions you are going to need, then you can start looking inward and saying, okay, well, I think these, this cohort of people are potentials who we can bring along this chain in this journey. You’ll have greater employee retention and loyalty. You’ll have greater success in terms of bringing people, especially as people start to move through the organization, into higher level positions who have a clear understanding of every stage and aspect of the business. It will make for a much stronger organizational culture and organization as a whole because of the way that you invest in your people.

[COBY]: Yeah. And one of the things that, we often ask people when we talk about, like, you know, do you have succession planning, career ladders? You know, can people build a career with you? A lot of people say, well, no one wants to work here for more than three or four years. I’m like, regardless of what they want, do you actually have a bit of a plan? Like, could someone go from the mail room to the boardroom? Is their infrastructure, is there ideas? Is there, is there. Exactly. Can that happen? And if they’re like, well, no, then we’re like, well, then you don’t sound like you’re a, more than three to four year employer for a lot of people. Right. So the idea of, like, you know, yes, it’s definitely a more transitional piece. We talked about the idea about job security kind of, you know, needs to be. Maybe we need to think about it a little bit differently about job security for almost like wage security rather than 30 year career security. But the idea is that if, you know, you only, if you don’t think employees are worth holding on to, you won’t hold on to them. But if you can try to figure out that there is support, there is encouragement, there is a bit of a plan about moving from the mail room to the boardroom on a long plan. Obviously, then there’s something there that you can work with that people will recognize that you will see a bit of a shift in loyalty if you’re showing it back to them. Loyalty is a two way street, right? So the idea of succession planning has to be about the idea of, if there’s a plan behind it, we value the growth of it, and we value investing in our employees so that they can reinvest their talents back into our business.

[JAMES]: And it plays into so many other crucial areas like, appreciation and recognition. Feels incredibly good as an employee to have your manager, your boss, your CEO come to you and say, I think you have the ability to go far in our organization and we want to invest in you it creates, you were talking about loyalty. There’s no better way to create loyalty than to show it in that manner. To that. You know what I, Coby, I see you. I value what you’ve done so far, and I think you can do better, and we’re going to help you achieve that. It’s a really powerful tool to drive engagement, to drive a, sense of belonging, to drive this idea of loyalty, of, like it’s, it can be such a powerful tool that is so underutilized.

[COBY]: Well, so here’s the thing. For a manager listening to this. Somebody in supervisory role, if you don’t have a plan in place for, you know, your absence. Then go back to what we talked about with the acting executive piece. Try that out. Maybe it’s not an official, policy thing, but maybe you decide that you want to make it a standard operating procedure for your team. Just try that out. There’s no cost to it. You might have to have some mentoring and some, and some, maybe some, informing people of the higher ups. This is going to be the new SoP or whatever it is. But that’s something that you could do today if you want to see how succession planning and temporary talent can actually improve the organization and start to build a bit of that little pieces towards a workforce plan, that’s something that a lot of people who are listening could probably do, you know, in short order and would actually be able to see a difference in a lot of these things just by, within their own authority level.

[JAMES]: Yeah.

[COBY]: Yeah. So I think so. I think. I think this has been a good conversation. I don’t want to go too long. So do you have any other thoughts before I do a bit of a wrap up?

[JAMES]: These are going to require time and energy. They’re not necessarily going to require a ton of cost. Like, these are things that can be done on pretty limited budgets, which means that they can be done by most businesses. If you are willing to take the time to step back, align your workforce goals with what the organization is trying to achieve, and then just start making a plan, you don’t need to do everything all at once. Pick where. Once you’ve done a bit of an assessment, you know, where the biggest gaps are. Start there, start small, just start.

[COBY]: Yeah. All right. So the question was, how can we get a better handle on, workforce planning? Well, largely we want to kind of help identify that you need, that you need to move from everything being reactionary, involving your workforce, your talent management, everything that to having a bit more of a strategic plan, strategic intent around the work that you do while you’re trying to shift to that more strategic intent. There are three considerations that we recommend. The first is a strength based strategy where you try and look at, instead of everybody being amazing at everything and carrying a whole job on themselves, could you move towards a strength based team and talk about having the right skills in the right place and idea of complementing skill sets and a bit of a plan and framework to allow you to actually to know what’s going to give people m more satisfaction by letting them more, do more of what they’re already good at, and building teams where people are actually playing their strengths rather than expected to kind of carry all aspects of the job all at once. Number two is, like, in consideration was temporary talent, looking at things like fractional leadership, acting executives, or interim interventions as tools that you could pull on to kind of have some temporary resources, in place to help during growth stages or to help kind of planning for hiring people down the road, but having that stopgap to kind of fill those roles and fill those expertise until you need them. And then the third is succession planning. Are you actually trying to move people up the chain? Are there infrastructures in place where people are being identified and kind of given a bit of a journey to help them find a reason to stay with you in the long term? Asking yourself the question, could someone go from the mail room to the boardroom? Is there processes in place or support or even a desire to make that happen? These are, That’s a great question to ask yourself when you’re trying to think about succession planning, because largely, when it comes to workforce planning, a big part of it is, do we want workforce planning, our future to be about growth, innovation, and developing human capital? Or do we have this kind of limited idea of workforce planning really being about something that we have to do as a box to check for our strategic pieces. And it’s not about strategic growth, it’s about traditional structures, or it’s about putting, again, pen to paper and checking boxes that we have a bit of a plan, because it’s really important to realize that the people that you rely on for your organization to grow are the people that are going to be, ideally, your future. So you want to make sure that you’re planning for them, investing in them. Good. All right, so that does it for us. For a full archive of the podcast and access to the video version hosted on our YouTube channel, visit www.roman3.ca/podcast. Thanks for joining us.

[ANNOUNCER]: For more information on topics like these, don’t forget to visit us at www.roman3.ca. Side effects of this podcast may include improved retention, high productivity, increased market share, employees breaking out in spontaneous dance, dry mouth, a version of the sound of James’ voice, desire to find a better podcast….