Building the Bench

The 9 box graphic is a first step, who do you have and who do you need.  Jack Welch called it his 70-20-10 rule. 70% of your staff will fit into the yellow blocks 20 % are the green and 10% are the red.  Keeping the 10% is neither a favor to them nor you unless they can be retrained to another team or part of the company.  The 20% are your rock stars of today. the question becomes will they be the rock stars of the future, are they developing themselves for changes in the industry?

As you review your current staff; Look at those in the yellow who is content  doing what they are doing and has no desire to move up?  Who is interested in learning new skills, can be cross trained, or wants to move up?  You need both types, the ones that want to do their current jobs and the ones that want to expand. Who is planning to retire, or move?

Once you have this information, it’s time to overlay it with the current org chart and with the strategic plan for growth. Look for potential problem areas and gaps.  Remember this is not just the leadership team but every position bottom up top down

1. Understand What The Future Could Look Like

Nobody is a fortune teller  Who could have predicted Covid and all the changes? There will be unexpected vacancies on your team, whether that’s unanticipated medical leave or people moving into different roles with different companies  or even different roles in your company.

There are aspects of the future that you can plan for—and career development is arguably the biggest one. What roles are currently on your team? What do you anticipate your team looking like a few years in the future? How do you think people will move through those roles? Below is a sample. Do it for 1 year, 3 years, and five years.

2. Dive Into The Details Of Each Position

It’s hard to identify successors if you don’t have a solid handle on the details of each position on your team. While you might think you already understand what employees are up to each day, you’ll probably be surprised by how many tasks and responsibilities are flying under the radar.

For that reason, make sure that you’re using a portion of your one-on-one conversations with employees to touch base on what’s on their plate. That will give you a realistic understanding of what they’re actually tasked with—beyond what was listed in the initial job description.

You could even formalize this process a bit by making this a collaborative exercise with your team members. Provide them with a brief questionnaire or document that asks them to share:

• Major tasks they’re responsible for
• Skills they think are most essential in their role
• Roles and teams they frequently collaborate with
• Tools and software they frequently use
• Who else can do their job  if properly trained
• What other jobs would they like
• How cross training can help

Make sure they know this exercise is important to the growth of the company and where they want to fit.

3. Identify Your Options

When you’re left with an open position and uncovered responsibilities, there are a number of different ways you could fill that role gap. You could:

• Hire a new employee
• Move an internal employee
• Divide responsibilities among team members
• Outsource work to external vendors
• Eliminate the position

You aren’t at a total loss here—you have options. And, the previous step equipped you with the details of each role that you’d need to fill or cover, so you have a mold to figure out which routes are most feasible and the least disruptive.

4. Make Your Tentative Plan

You’ve determined where your team is headed, who currently does what, and what choices you have to fill role gaps. Now, all that’s left to do is figure out what your ideal plan looks like.

Let’s sketch this out with an example. You and your company leadership have already discussed the potential of adding the Head of Content role to your marketing team within the next year or so. Your current Content Marketing Manager has expressed interest in that promotion—and you know they’d be a great fit.

But, that upward movement leaves a key management role on your team (the Content Manager position) empty. What does that mean for the future and that opening? You might decide that you’ll:

• Promote your existing Content Marketing Manager to Head of Content
• Promote your existing SEO Specialist to Content Marketing Manager
• Hire a new employee to fill the vacant SEO Specialist role, but outsource that work to an SEO agency until you find a suitable replacement
• Redesign the job anhd delegate responsibilities to others thereby eliminating the formal role

Keep in mind that this plan might not be bulletproof when the time comes—things change. However, having this rough plan in place at least gives you a starting point when you need to address role gaps.

1. More steps

Identify the most vulnerable roles at every level. Office manager, executive assistant and payroll are of equal importance to some leadership. So too are the skilled roles on any level.

2. Have Career Development Conversations Early And Often

Sure, your ideal plan might be to eventually move your existing Content Marketing Manager into the Head of Content role. But, if they aren’t actually interested in taking that step up, that plan doesn’t do you any good.

That’s one of the many reasons it’s important to have regular and honest career development conversations with all of your employees—even with team members that don’t yet have a clear next step or path to advancement.

In your one-on-one meetings, make sure you’re asking questions like:

• What career goals are top of mind for you right now?
• What’s your ideal next step in your career?
• Do you have access to the learning and development resources you need?
• What skills are you hoping to build upon in the next year?
• What do you value most in your career?
• Are there other areas of the company you’d be interested in exploring?

These prompts and candid conversations make employees feel heard, valued, and supported. They also give you useful information you can use to not only iron out succession plans, but ensure you have the right talent to stick with those plans. When 45% of managers say they lack confidence to help employees develop the skills they need, this direct insight is beneficial.

3. Shine The Spotlight On Documentation

Regardless of what role gap you need to plug on your team, making documentation a staple of your culture and processes will make everybody’s life so much easier.

81% of employees say that knowledge gained from hands-on experience is the hardest to replace when it’s lost. Plus, the same research found that inefficient knowledge sharing costs large businesses $47 million per year.

Documenting common processes does away with siloed information and creates a resource that people can turn to when responsibilities need to be either temporarily covered or permanently reallocated.

Similarly, using a collaborative work management platform (like Monday.com or so many others) gives everybody the visibility and transparency they need to step in on projects and tasks—without a ton of digging and confusion.

Creating a solid bench gives you a roadmap that you can follow as your team grows and people move into different positions (whether that’s with your company or elsewhere). Going through the process allows you to feel far more prepared to address role gaps without a frantic scramble.

However, even if you plan everything as carefully as possible, that doesn’t mean it’ll always be smooth sailing. Somebody who’s a crucial part of the plan might unexpectedly exit your company. Or your department might go through a reorganization. There will still be times when things slip through the cracks or you need to identify some less-than-perfect solutions just to make it through.

For that very reason,  planning the bench strength isn’t a one-and-done activity. You need to ride the waves and make adjustments as things change. Remember, the world of business is volatile, and sometimes, out-of-the-blue, critical employees choose to leave an organization.  You are developing a team to respond to these changes and adapt, so you can stay in the game. By developing your employees, you are creating an agile organization to respond to unexpected situations all the while improving employee engagement.