Camille Rapacz: Who are the future leaders in your organization? Do you have a clear picture of how you'll fill key positions from within? Or are you dependent on external hires? And is there a clear right or wrong way to fill these critical leadership roles?
Today we're talking about bench depth, when and why it matters, and most importantly, how to build it.
Camille: Welcome to The Belief Shift. The show that explores. What you really need to know about building a successful business.
I'm your host, Camille Rapacz: business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance.
George: And I'm George Drapeau: your co-host and her brother. I'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it. But mostly we're bringing practical solutions so you and your business can thrive.
Camille Rapacz: Hello, George.
George Drapeau: Hey, Camille. How are ya?
Camille Rapacz: I'm doing well. I am curious. This is like one of those psychological tests. What's the first thing that comes to mind when I say the words bench depth?
George Drapeau: Square.
Camille Rapacz: Succession plan.
George Drapeau: I mean, just the synonym, succession plan. That's first thing that comes to mind.
Camille Rapacz: All right. Well, that's the end of the episode today, everybody. George. That was great. We're getting more
George Drapeau: succinct at these all the time. That's awesome.
Camille Rapacz: I know. I mean, now we're just going to have like five minute podcasts and there you go.
Everybody do succession planning. End of story.
George Drapeau: If I think more deeply about it, about stuff like what comes with that, what comes with bench depth, like, how are you planning for successors? How are you building up backups to your people? Not just how do I put this? I have not thought about this before, Camille, but like succession planning is one thing like developing your leaders when people move on to new positions.
But there's also like standard backup capacity within your own team. Like what if somebody goes on vacation for a while or somebody gets sick? They're not gone, but they're, absent for a while, but you still need the capacity. And depending how tightly run your organization is, sometimes you can deal with somebody being gone for a month, no problem.
Sometimes you need somebody the next hour. You know, like, and so I guess bench depth to me is also like, do you have a good idea of what skill sets and how much capacity within each group and who are your, their delegates or your backups for short term stuff versus that person's leaving the organization, you need to replace them.
How about that?
Camille Rapacz: Agreed. I think that bench depth is about more than just leadership, filling the roles. That's mainly what I was going to focus on in this conversation. But as I was mapping this out, I was thinking, you know, there's a really important aspect to this, which is what you just described.
And that is: We just have critical roles in the organization, aren't necessarily leadership roles. That's just somebody has some institutional knowledge that goes way back or somebody has a very specific a particular set of skills. Is that like a Liam Neeson movie?
George Drapeau: Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking.
Camille Rapacz: So yeah, or we have Liam Neeson in our teams and we need to have somebody who can back him up. So yes, I do think bench depth is also about can I handle any disruptions in my team? Whether they be leaving or, you know, they're absent for a while or whatever that looks like, do I have a way to handle that well?
So yes. Most of this is going to focus on the leadership aspect and the succession planning, but I want us to weave in that part of it too, as we talk about it.
So defining bench depth, of course, I always want to start with defining things.
When we talk about bench depth in a business, it is about having the capable individuals who are ready to step up into leadership roles as needed. Or in the case of this other option into other critical roles. This means that they are being prepared for these roles before they are needed. That is what it means to have bench depth.
And why do we care? Why does this matter? What do we used to say? We used to say what happens if so and so gets hit by a bus?
George Drapeau: Somebody wins the lottery. Actually, it's funny. I, I say, what if you get hit by a bus? And I constantly for the past 10 years have been corrected by HR saying, no, no, no, no, we don't say that anymore.
We're saying win the lottery. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Fine. If somebody can't handle and gets hit by a bus, then I'm in the wrong organization, but okay, sure.
Camille Rapacz: Yes. I was literally in a conversation earlier this week with a client where the exact same thing happened. Somebody said hit by a bus and someone else said, maybe win the lottery.
We're like, yeah, get it. We want a more positive thing to happen to our people when they move on. So, you know, maybe they resign. Maybe they have a health issue. Maybe they have a health issue in the family. Maybe they, some people have to, you know, move across the country and take care of a family member or, or maybe they just got an exciting new career opportunity.
Or could have won the lottery, of course. Yeah. I think when we say the win the lottery, I feel like that makes it sound like there is such a slim chance of this happening. Do I really have to plan for it? All of these other things are much more likely to happen.
George Drapeau: Maybe make a comment about this.
Camille Rapacz: Yes.
George Drapeau: Regardless of the reason, one thing we know is that people leave roles all the time. It always happens. If you were to take the time and think about whatever group you're part of leading, reporting into whatever, it changes year to year. You never have the same people, exactly the same people for more than, I don't know, half a year, a year.
You may think you do, but you don't. People leave all the time. Who cares why? It happens. It happens.
Camille Rapacz: 100%. Yes. One of my notes here was just that we definitely underestimate the chances that someone is going to leave the organization anytime soon. Yeah. We just don't worry about it enough. we don't.
And this podcast is all about my opinions. So there you go. That's my opinion.
George Drapeau: I'm here for it.
Camille Rapacz: If you do not have somebody who is ready to fill those roles, what happens? We have instability, we have uncertainty. These are all bad things in a business and it also can lead to burnout for people.
Sometimes I see the solution to this be, okay, this team is now going to also report to this other leader. Suddenly some leader gets like double duty and we're just going to cause them to burn out. Right. That's just not great. Or it could be the other way where. The team is just supposed to kind of go on their own.
Like there isn't really anybody serving as their leader. They might be like, I'm your manager now in the interim because they have to from an HR perspective, but they're not really offering them any support. So the team's on their own. And so then the team is going to burn out. Yeah. No matter what these podge podgy solutions are, it's putting stress in the organization and You need to address that as soon as possible because it's dragging the organization down.
George Drapeau: Yeah, absolutely.
Camille Rapacz: Have you ever worked in an organization, George, that lacked this bench depth and like you could see it?
George Drapeau: Yes. The majority of my career has been like that where bench depth has not been properly articulated and planned for. And I can tell you both sides when I'm in an organization where they do talk about succession plan, it's an explicit conversation.
It is great. Even if it's not done particularly well, just doing that conversation is great. Really great if you stumble through it, but most of the time I've been in an org where it doesn't plan for bench depth. And what I noticed is that there's increased stress in the organization. Whether it's latent unconscious stress or conscious stress, but there's more stress because
people at some level realize, oh, there's no backup. If one thread breaks, we're screwed. And that's just kind of always sitting with you. It's like not having any savings in your bank account. Your organization is living paycheck to paycheck. That's a great analogy in my mind of how it feels.
Camille Rapacz: Yes. This is also where because it's bench depth, It is a sports analogy. You want to have your capable players who were trained and are ready to enter the game at any time because they know the plays, they know the team dynamics, like they know what to do.
And it doesn't just smooth this transition, but it also helps the organization to be able to continue going after new opportunities. Like they're not going to miss a beat, like to your point, like we're not just like barely getting by. We actually can keep going forward. I've seen organizations where A disruption of one person leaving puts an entire project on hold.
They're like, Nope, we got to put this project on hold until we fix this. We got to replace this person and do all this stuff. They don't have enough bench depths to just keep moving forward without this one person. It's crazy.
George Drapeau: That's ridiculous. Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: So when we talk about being resilient or being an agile, adaptive organization, this is what we mean.
You have to have good bench depth.
George Drapeau: The movie Hoosiers. There's a scene in Hoosiers where these, they're pretty thin on bench depth. And at one point they lose somebody, he fouls out and he plays with four players, four players from the team. Cause they just don't have more. I mean, this is a different point going on in that movie, but yeah, that, that happens.
And in sports and basketball all the time, they talk about having a thin bench or a deep bench and how much helps them be a championship level team or not.
Camille Rapacz: Yes. And thin or deep isn't about how many people. Yeah. It's about the skill sets of those people.
George Drapeau: Yeah, exactly.
Camille Rapacz: Let's talk about how we build bench depth.
George Drapeau: Okay.
Camille Rapacz: And this is where we would introduce succession planning, but you nailed that right out of the gate. So succession planning, let's talk a little bit. I want to talk about this though, because I do think sometimes we throw around succession planning as a thing to do, but we don't really do it well.
So when we talk about succession planning, this is about making really strategic choices about how you're going to build bench depth. You've got to identify those key roles in the organization and understand what, they need. And which talents you already have that can potentially fill those roles in the future.
So you're trying to do a little match. I have these key roles, and here are the people who have the potential to do these roles in the future. They're not doing them today, but they could potentially do it tomorrow. Not because they're capable right this moment, but I can see they have potential to do that role.
That requires a lot of conversation. That requires leaders to actually be, having conversations across the board about this, because it might not necessarily be just within your division or your department, but it could be cross departmental. That's where the real strength of an organization could come in.
So you need to be doing this well. And it's, it's just not always executed well, because again, the fact that as humans, we just aren't good at long term planning works its way into this problem as well. Right.
George Drapeau: It's true.
Camille Rapacz: And I think that having a set of standards for what different levels of leadership, the expectations of them are, and what those standards look like is really important.
Because you might say, I think that so and so has the potential to be a manager in my group. And someone else might say, I don't, I don't see that the same way. And so maybe that means you have a mismatch on what your expectation of managers or directors or any level should be. And I've seen this happen where somebody thinks so and so is great.
And they're like, how did they get promoted? I would never, I don't see them, you know, be having the capability to do that job. So you have to have conversations across leadership and get alignment.
George Drapeau: Totally agree. For me, it's really cool, but probably only for management nerds, it's really cool.
The interplay between career development and succession planning, because those conversations happening at leadership, you're talking about what you need, one year out, two plus years out, an emergency, internally, externally, and then developing, talking about, and to those key high potential people you want to help get ready for.
You're out taking over that interplay between those two things is just, it's great.
Camille Rapacz: It is great. And it's so great for also creating more of a motivation for your people to stick around.
George Drapeau: And it doesn't mean you're, you're talking to somebody and saying, Hey I want to develop these skills for you because in one year you're going to take over this person's jobs.
It's not a promise, but just telling them, look, that's the direction we're getting you. This is why we're training you in this way. I want to give you these experiences. Regardless in a year, that person may still be here, but think about what kind of stuff you're going to be able to put on your resume and whatever.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. And think about just how much stronger you're making everyone in the organization by thinking this way. By thinking about, we're always working on skilling people up where they have the potential and could be our future leaders. And the idea that you're looking at people in that way, it's also the most respectful way to lead people.
It's like, Hey, I'm going to challenge you to, step up and be ready, like be waiting in the wings and ready to take on these other roles. It doesn't mean, like you said, there's no promises here. Cause I'm not going to move somebody out of that role just to make room for you, but you are investing them and skilling them up.
And that might mean that they take those skills and go to another company. I think this is one of the fears that people can have. It's like, well, what if they just get tired of waiting around and they go somewhere else with those. I've got them ready and they take a job at another company.
Sure. But that's a risk either way. I don't think you're increasing that risk.
George Drapeau: No, no, I don't think so either. And . I think it's hard for people to accept that until you actually do this and try.
Camille Rapacz: Yes.
George Drapeau: Were building up this great credibility with your people. They realize that they're in an environment that's really supportive, which is rare.
And people don't want to really leave that environment. And when they do, you've established this long trusting relationship and it's kind of okay. And . It's not like that. Yeah. Make a personal comment here before we go on. I just, we've been doing a bunch of episodes now and I just realized something about myself.
I'm going to have to really reflect on this, but I think many of my approaches to management are about raising morale. This all comes down to raising around somewhere like, like this. One thing I like about succession planning merged with career planning is it raises the morale of individuals in the organization overall.
It gives people confidence like, Hey, we know where this organization is going. We think about organizations future. We understand what this is about. We're not just operating at random. There's part of a plan when you're creating backup plans for people. People feel okay that, Oh, I could take a month off and I don't have to worry about whether I'm screwing over the organization.
It feel more relaxed. Morale is higher. And I'm so many things we've talked about in these episodes. I just realized that my motivation for it is to raise morale. I don't know why. I guess that's my angle. That's who I am.
Camille Rapacz: That's a great, A center to have as a leader,
I'm centered around how am I improving morale on my team? And you use all of these tools as the way to do that.
George Drapeau: I guess so. It'd probably be better if I were more focused on the business results.
Camille Rapacz: The Braille's nice. I mean, yes, you do have to pay attention to business results, but don't they kind of go hand in hand?
Like, I hope so. I have to do that too. You know?
George Drapeau: Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: I mean, the whole reason you want to raise morale is so that you get better results.
George Drapeau: I think so. You have a top operating team that operates without fear. They take risks, they do all kinds of stuff. They work well to each other. There's no drama, all that stuff that comes with good morale.
Yeah. I mean, it's just, it's nice.
Camille Rapacz: Yes. The succession planning thing, it is about more than having names next to each position. So it's not saying, yep, George could be the next VP of blah, blah, blah. It's more than just that. And sometimes I find succession planning kind of gets simplified to that. Like, oh, it's probably so and so who would take that role. Okay, but why and what else do they need? What's the gap? What's the skill gap for them to do that? And are we working on it? Yeah, so if you're not actively developing these potential leaders that you have put into this plan, then you're not really doing succession planning.
So to your point, it is about having the conversation around career paths. This is a career development conversation. You need to understand what their aspirations are, and you need to align that with the needs and the goals of the organization.
Like you said, you're connecting those things together. Like we need these things in the organization and then these individuals want these things. And where do these match up?
So it's a win win for everybody.
George Drapeau: Win win. Totally is.
Camille Rapacz: So if you create that path, you make it really clear and transparent, it's not only that you're preparing your team for future transitions, but to your point, it's going to boost motivation and retention.
Like it's a morale booster, it really does. This is how we want to do it. I think so. Yeah.
So how do we do it though? How do we make leaders bench depth capable?
George Drapeau: Yeah. Okay. Tell me,
Camille Rapacz: is that even a term? I just made that up. Sure.
George Drapeau: It it's a great bench depth, capable. Yeah. You
Camille Rapacz: know what I mean?
I'm
George Drapeau: capable of bench depth!
Camille Rapacz: Okay. Maybe it's term, it's now term. Term. It's now a bad term. Forget I said that term, . Developing leaders internally is, the most direct way to strengthen the bench. How you develop leaders internally. This is both a, there's a general focus here and then a very specific and deliberate focus.
So there's a bunch of things you can do here, which are all going to kind of just sound like leadership development. The difference is that you're having the conversation about specific career paths and roles that fit in the organization. So sometimes organizations will do leadership development without succession planning, which means we're just generally developing people.
But we aren't being specific enough to say, we think so and so is going to be a great has the potential to be the director of this department someday and or this division and we've had the conversation with them. They also want that. And so that's what we're setting them up to do someday.
Okay. You're doing both of those things. Otherwise, if you aren't having that conversation and you're just saying we're going to develop your leadership skills, that's good. It's just not also adding the succession planning and all of that into it. Which is true building a bench depth. So there's like this multifaceted approach.
Mentoring was the one that comes top of mind to me. So that's where you're pairing people up with common, talents and skills and helping them understand how that works in this organization. So mentoring is a great one.
There's just basic formal leadership training workshops seminars, upskilling them and leadership skills.
And then there's coaching. Supporting leaders in, developing them individually.
But the 2 that you really start to become more specific to building the bench depth in a specific way, I think are job rotation or job shadowing. Oh, yeah, you can get leaders to experience parts of the company that because as you move up in an organization, you need to be more aware of what's going on across the organization.
So helping them to understand what's going on in other parts of the company is huger. You're building their business acumen too. So they get a bigger perspective, which is what you need as somebody moves up as a leader. And then hands on experience, like give them a chance to do things that they don't normally do in that job, but potentially have to do later, like a big presentation, running a project, whatever that looks like in your organization. But give them a chance to work on some actual things they can get feedback on.
Also you can test out, do they really have the I think they do? You don't know until you get them into these spots, but don't do any of that without some coaching and some guidance in, you know, just like throwing them into the deep end and seeing if they can swim is not at all what I'm talking about.
George Drapeau: I can picture that very clearly.
Job rotation programs, in my experience they're good all around. The people who get to participate in them generally have a lot of fun because they get new experiences. They see a lot of new different things and they're not as accountable as they would be for their full time job.
They'll do stuff, but they don't have to, they get to do it in the kind of way that you and I talk about, which is throw people in the deep end of the pool, let them make lots of mistakes. Don't punish them for that. Job shadowing, rotations often do that.
Camille Rapacz: Yes.
George Drapeau: Low stakes, high experience. The hands on experience. Like something as simple as, Hey, I'm going to send you to my meeting.
You never done it before, but go to my meeting for me and see what that's like. Let me tell you what it's about. So you're not just going in blind.
Camille Rapacz: Again. Yes. Not throwing them into the deep end without you're preparing them, like, Hey, here's how it usually goes. Here's what to do. And, and being thoughtful about, you know, Oh, I think this next meeting would be a good one.
This is a good one for them to go and get a feel for it and run it. Not zero stakes. But maybe low stakes to start with.
George Drapeau: Low stakes. Yeah.
Yeah. Not hunt for red October briefing in the situation room style. Not that way.
Camille Rapacz: Oh, that's a good example. Yeah. Don't do that.
George Drapeau: Don't do that. Who's doing the briefing?
You are Dr. Ryan.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. Do not assume your people are Dr. Ryan level ready.
George Drapeau: Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: He is a fictional character after all. I do want to give leaders a little bit of grace in this because what we're talking about, sending somebody else to one of your meetings, preparing them for some job rotation, that takes some work on your part as a leader to do that.
So when you're trying to build bench depth for yourself, maybe you're trying to get your own. So, you know, VPs especially need to be aware of who's my successor. Like who's going to take my place as I go. And I know I run into organizations all the time who have people who are kind of on their way out and they're not really thinking about who their successor is. Or they're thinking about it too late.
Like we should have been grooming somebody for a couple of years and they're just now thinking about it. This is a problem. You need to be thinking about it and it is going to take some time.
So if you have this as a thing that is an expectation of all leaders in the organization, it's much easier than if you're just leaving it to individual leaders to decide for themselves. It really needs to be an organization wide thing that you do.
George Drapeau: Yeah, that's nice.
Camille Rapacz: So as you know, we're want to do, we have to talk about what can go wrong. What do you think goes wrong when people try to do this whole bench depth building succession planning thing?
George Drapeau: Wow. I think one thing that goes wrong is they only think about one time frame, like a static point in time. For example, instead of thinking of different phases or levels of readiness. I also either biting off more than they can chew, and I want to ask you about this for your opinion about this, or limiting the succession plan or the bench steps building too tightly so you're not doing it enough.
And what I mean by the first one is, I want to ask you, do you think you should be building bench step for every single person in your organization? When does the benefit versus effort ratio flip? If ever.
Camille Rapacz: I think it would be impossible to do it for everybody.
Well, I mean, anything's possible, I guess. I think there is a, diminishing point of return in trying to do it for everybody. There are roles that are very easy to fill externally. Yeah. Okay. And so I think depending on your industry, that's the work that leaders should be doing is at what level do we need to do succession planning?
And so I think you need to look at the roles that are going to be hardest to fill, or that will benefit the most from having internal succession planning planning. And that's going to depend on that organization, the industry, the maturity, so many things. This is my first one was that leaders aren't having conversations enough about this across the board, cross functional areas to gain alignment on which positions we should be doing this for and what the qualifications of our candidates for the succession planning should be. what qualifies them to be put on the list of this could be a potential successor to this role?
And those conversations need to happen on an ongoing basis. This is a strategy, you have to be really thoughtful about where you're going to do it and how you're going to do it because it does take time to invest in developing those people.
George Drapeau: I would say another one that I think of, I wouldn't call it wrong, but I would say like pro tip It's not talking about it to everybody. Not stating, hey, we do succession planning at this place. Like, I don't think it's necessarily wrong. to do it in secret. But you're not really benefiting your organization maximally if you keep it a secret. It's better if you say, we're not going to tell you all the details about who's on what succession plans.
There is some confidentiality here, but we want you to know succession planning is the thing this organization does. And here's how it's going to come down to you at some point. Everybody knows succession planning happens here. And I think most, organizations I've been in.
Even the ones that do successions planning don't really advertise it. And I think they could do better.
Camille Rapacz: I totally agree with this. So my, where it goes wrong was that they don't communicate the process clearly to all employees. Yeah. Just tell everybody we have a process. It looks like this, whatever that looks like, we meet every quarter and review or whatever it is.
You don't have to tell them who's on the list. But you need them to know like we're doing this and we are consistently evaluating who's on this list and this is what happens when we identify people. So that people will know that this is happening in the organization because why wouldn't you want them to know?
I mean, isn't that a motivator right there? I
George Drapeau: think so. I think it is. Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: I might be on that list if I do the right work.
George Drapeau: That's a career conversation. Hey, how do I get on somebody's succession plan? What do I need to do to be considered a successor?
Camille Rapacz: Yeah, that goes right into your professional development plan, like, Oh, I need to work on my skills here or there in order to actually be considered. This is where all the leaders have to gather and agree on what are the most essential leadership skills that you're looking for. Yeah. And how would you know? I think that's the other thing. How would you know?
And then how do people demonstrate that to you? Being able to know and see that is really important.
I think the other place that this goes wrong it's really more about how organizations can just miss how critical this is to overall business performance. Every single disruption in your business is costing you money. Every single disruption and people leaving is disruptive.
This is a mitigation plan for that. How do I mitigate this? I can reduce the negative impact of people leaving and I can actually turn it into a positive, this is where you turn a risk into opportunity. That's what succession planning does.
George Drapeau: Yeah, that's nice.
Camille Rapacz: So now that we've said all of that, I do want to address something else, which is that sometimes it does not make sense to hire from within. I want to give some examples. I'm curious if you have one, like right off the top of your head, when would you want to hire externally into your organization?
George Drapeau: I'll make two comments. One is if I sense that the organization is really just too bogged down with legacy thinking, like deeply bogged down with legacy thinking, and you need to inject some kind of new thinking there, that's one reason.
Camille Rapacz: Perfect. That's a big reason.
George Drapeau: I would say in the best succession plan that I've seen in the past, the guy who ran it, one of those, we had to for criteria for who's ready now to fill this role, who's ready in six months, who's ready in a year or whatever.
And one of them was who's your emergency external hire. Like, if you needed to get somebody to fill this position in a hurry right now, I'm conflating two different terms, emergency and external hire, but he always wanted to see external candidates because this guy was thinking at your certain level, your professional network extends beyond the company and there's other people you work with and have worked with.
You think, man, if only I could have gotten this guy on the board, the company and they become recruitment targets because they're people you want to bring into the family because they're your kind of people. So like if the organization is high functioning and you want more of that, there are people outside the organization probably in your past you think, Oh man, I'd love to work with this person again.
They'd be great here. That's a positive reason for getting somebody external, I would say. Separately there was the thing about who's your, who's your emergency. I find somebody now, but sometimes it could be internal or external. So I'm sorry, I was conflating two different thoughts.
Camille Rapacz: I think you bring up a really good point. The first one, yeah, you need a fresh perspective where we've gotten bogged down in legacy thinking. We're lacking the ability to innovate. We need some new ideas. That's a great reason to do it. But this other
one is also really critical, which is, sometimes you just know, there are people that I know in my network that are external in the organization, but if given the opportunity and I could pull them in, I want to do that.
And that's a whole other way of thinking about, building up your organization.
Some other reasons that I put down were you might just have a clear skill gap that you've just not been able to close or is something that it's just, we need this higher level of skill because we haven't been keeping up with the growth and maturity in the business.
And we need someone who can just bring that in. That's going to help us skill up really fast. Somebody who already has it.
George Drapeau: Yeah, we had an example for that in the company I'm in where we needed to hire AI expertise that just didn't exist at this company. The only place we could find it was externally.
Camille Rapacz: Absolutely. I also think if you've got crisis, a leadership crisis around maybe the company's had a hit reputation, is struggling financially, they need some kind of big turnaround. Yeah. You might also bring a leader from the outside who's maybe done this kind of work before or has a very specific plan for that.
George Drapeau: Interesting.
Camille Rapacz: Crisis management can be a thing.
Scaling was another thing that I thought of, which is, sometimes your business is growing at a rate that the, people there aren't familiar with managing at that big of a scale. The company's gotten big and outgrown the leaders that are there on the ground and like, Oh, they're not capable of running an organization quite this big.
George Drapeau: I typically hear this in terms of CEOs. Like you hear this is a startup CEO. This is a get to a billion dollar CEO. This is get to a 10 billion CEO kind of person. At some point you can't grow, you can't take that CEO through all the stages or the company doesn't have the people to take the company to the next level.
You have to bring somebody from outside. Yeah. Yeah. I get that.
Camille Rapacz: Absolutely. There's another take on getting a fresh perspective, which is often put under the umbrella of diversity and inclusion. And as you and I've talked about before, it's not about, I just need to be diverse to show that I'm diverse.
It is about, I need, Different perspectives on the team and so thinking about diversity and inclusion about I need to hear more voices from different perspectives from people from different communities from different ways of, moving through the world.
Those different perspectives, if you have a lot of leaders cut from the same cloth, that's going to be a problem for you in the organization. You're not going to be able to advance ideas as quickly as you could if you were more diverse. So that's just kind of another take on that perspective.
That's a great point. Yeah. Another reason I have is and I think this really relates to what you were talking about. There might be a specific person outside the organization you have your eye on, which is a competitive advantage. So this might be a strategic move where I'm going to acquire a specific type of talent or I'm going to bring a specific person over.
Some people even think of this as like, if I want to, steal so and so from the competitor, literally.
George Drapeau: Yeah. That's what I thought you were going with this. Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: I mean, that could, that could be it.
George Drapeau: Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: But it could just generally be like our experience on the team. We're just lacking this particular type of talent and I need to bring that in from the outside.
And then the last reason you do it is that you have failed to succession plan. Oh, well, you failed or maybe you've done succession planning and you have gaps. Like we just don't have people who we think can fill. So you can't force it right. You can't say these are all the positions we would like to have successors for.
And you can't force yourself to fill them in with internal. Sometimes you just have a gap where you're like, we really don't have anybody on the team right now. Maybe we did, but so and so left and now we don't. So that's another reason why even with the best laid plans, you could still end up with gaps in your succession plan.
So there are absolutely reasons to hire externally. The point here is that you'd be strategic about it. You be thoughtful about it, and you don't always assume it's going to be an external hire. You need to have a nice balance of both of these things.
George Drapeau: makes sense. These are great.
Camille Rapacz: I was going to ask you when you've seen an external hire be the best choice history?
George Drapeau: Sure. Most commonly, I think it's because there's a skill gap internally, give you an example. At Red Hat some years ago, the company was looking at getting into the telecommunications market.
And had no significant expertise. So we hired a guy who had been the head of telco sales for Sun Microsystems for a while, was great at it. And it was a strong business for Sun. So we just identified that guy and got it. And he built a whole telco organization within the company because that's what he does.
That's what that guy does. You and there was nobody we could have promoted. We could have given somebody a job saying go learn about telco and go do that market, but that would have taken years if even possible, but this guy external was good at it. We knew it. We paid for him. We got him. That's the most common case that I've seen.
Camille Rapacz: Your example was a great one. Which is you're trying to get into a new market that you don't have any experience with. Bring somebody in who knows that market. Absolutely.
George Drapeau: Yeah. Big skill gap.
Camille Rapacz: Even though we've been talking about the succession plan and the leadership piece, going back to what you said before, which is just the bench depth within a team.
So that a team feels like, any one of them can, Go away for a month and come back and they don't just have all their work piled up. The team can still operate. I think there what you really want is you want some cross training. You want people to understand what each other's work is on the team so they can back each other up in the best way possible.
And that's going to look different on different teams. I think if you genuinely have a high performing team, that's what they do. It's not just that they all do their individual roles well, it's that they know how to back each other up as they're working, for all the functions of the department in general, the whole team.
If you're just in charge of, one singular team and you're thinking, well, I don't know if my company has this full succession planning. Well, you can definitely do it just for yourself, for your own role and within your own team and make sure that that depth is there.
George Drapeau: I have a test for this that I do with my folks.
So first of all, I have a very simple vacation rules. If you want to go on vacation, the further out, you tell me the better. And three things. Tell me what's gonna happen while you're gone. What issues might come across my desk where you're gone.
Tell me who your delegate is. And make sure they know they're your delegate so it's not a surprise.
And then notify your stakeholders. Make sure they all know. if you have trouble coming up with a delegate, this has failed. But also if they come back to you and say, Oh, don't worry. Nothing's gonna happen while I'm gone. Like, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, maybe not, but the whole point is what if it does, is there somebody I can delegate this to?
Cause I can't deal with that thing. Who would I delegate this to? You go figure that out or you're not going on vacation. Yeah. If the answer is like don't worry about it. Nothing's going to happen. They haven't worked. They haven't thought
Camille Rapacz: about it. Yeah.
George Drapeau: Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: That's a great test to see, if your team is really ready to handle each other's work. And also I think just that level of ownership of, you need to do some risk mitigation planning for when you leave and not just expect people to wing it. But actually give us some, like, if this, then that, if this, then that. And really it's should be simple for people to think through in their jobs before they go on vacation. Or if they can't, then that might be an indication you have a weak player on the team.
Yeah. Good test.
So how do you start building your own bench depth? I think you just start by a talent audit. What are the capabilities on my team? Where are my potential leaders?
Also internally doing what you just said. Okay. Making sure that people can understand each other's work. You've explained it enough to somebody that they could be your delegate when you go on vacation.
It's a great way to test it, yeah. Yeah. Great. Thank you.
And starting a mentoring program in an organization, I think is such a great idea. And helping potential leaders understand what that work really is, great way to do is through mentoring, and it's also creating some connection and it's letting leaders get to know these future leaders so they can also be assessing them at the same time.
Start having discussions about career aspirations with your team. Make sure you know what they're really looking to do and then see how that aligns to the organization's goals and see if these things match up so you can start making those connections.
George Drapeau: Yeah, I love that.
Camille Rapacz: Most importantly, , is to start this work and never stop.
It is not a one time activity.
Just continuously be thinking about succession planning. Think about it as this, tool in the toolkit of the organization that, when you need it, you want to be that organization that is ready, that that tool is primed and ready to go. And not that you get caught totally unprepared when people are leaving the organization and having to, put all the stress on your HR team to suddenly find you the right person because you didn't think that through.
George Drapeau: The first time you do it, I think it's an interesting exercise to just go ahead and try to name their successors for each of your key roles and see how hard it is to do. Like, If you try to do it and you say, Oh, wow, for half of these people, we really didn't have a clear idea at all about who might be the successor.
You'll know right away how much work you have to do. Or if you say, wow, we actually had successors in mind intuitively for half of our people. That's better than I thought. That could be good too. You know, you have some sense of what your organization about and you can build on that.
It's a very easy test. Let's just try it once. Quick. Lightning round. Who are your successors for the key people you think about? See how hard that is.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. Could be fun. that's a great exercise. Give it a try. See what happens. I'm going to try.
George Drapeau: See how much it hurts.
Camille Rapacz: That's all I have about bench depth.
Everybody work on it. Work on the bench depth and your team and your organization all over the place.
If you Have stories about bench depth gone well or gone wrong, or maybe you have questions about bench depth. You can leave us a voicemail at the belief shift. com. There's a little voicemail widget. Boop. You can just go in there. You can even do it anonymously. You don't even have to tell me who you are.
So you can just leave us some anonymous, lovely message. And we'll talk about it on the podcast. If you want, we'll address it. You can also, if you want help with this book, a free consultation with me at CamilleRapacz.com/bookacall
George Drapeau: To that!
Camille Rapacz: And all those links will be in the show notes.
that's all we have for this week. Thank you everybody for listening and we'll be back in your ears next week.
George Drapeau: See you soon, everybody.
