By Mike Cass
President, BC HRMA

Even though our 50th Annual BC HRMA Conference and Tradeshow is behind us, I know we will be “Founding Our Future” for years to come. As much was made evident from both the plenary stage and breakouts; there is a lot to be accomplished and HR plays a major role.

For those of you who joined us, I hope you enjoyed the conference and found plenty of meaningful ‘take aways’ to benefit both your organization, as well as our shared quest to continually improve upon the impact of forward-thinking HR. Collectively, we have accomplished great things; even greater things are to be expected.

April 2012 marked a pair of significant milestones for BC HRMA, both the 50th anniversary of conference and our 70th year as an Association. Needless to say, we have grown significantly over the past seven decades, but in many ways, we are still chasing some of the same issues identified in our 1942 charter, namely, “labour turnover and difficulties in obtaining skilled labour.”

Of course, that ‘chase’ is nothing less than the Holy Grail for BC HRMA members and succession management plays a key role in shaping the answer. What is succession management and why is it so important?  As you read through this edition, the answers to these questions will be reinforced.

For me, the answers are both simple and understandably complex. For our businesses to grow and prosper, we need people. More importantly – we need the right people.  Jim Collins has stated that for businesses to move from good to great, you need to have the right people, on the right bus and in the right seats. Succession management is as much a perspective as it is a tool to assist in finding and keeping the right people.

The complexity emerges as you develop that toolkit. Succession management starts with identifying the real or forecasted ‘gap’ in leadership. How do we replace the true leaders in our organizations?  As we know, true leadership is a scarcity across industries and across businesses within those industries. Can we really quantify the financial and non-financial impact of losing one of these leaders? What are the direct and indirect costs? The quantum impacts can be staggering.

Identifying succession candidates and those with high-potential is paramount to business success. Once you have identified such candidates, then the real work starts.  Each one will need an individual development plan that supports their development and ‘readies’ them for the next leadership role.

The challenge we now face is how to take the historical notion of job competencies and map them to new business intelligences. Do we know what our business needs are right now and what will they be in the future? Last, but not least, how are we incorporating social media into our succession plans?  Are we attracting the best? Are we founding our future with the best tools, talents and insights available?

Succession management demands a lot of questions be asked, but it also drives our business and will shape our future. The challenge remains the same, but it always pays to revisit the answers and open our minds to a new paradigm.

PeopleTalk Summer 2012