Succession Planning

            Succession Planning, the single most important factor ensuring the success of the future of the company from a safety, quality and production standpoint. Back in the mid-2000’s at the Sacramento Municipal Utility District the Manager and Superintendent of our Grid Assets T&D Line Division recognized that we needed to chart a course of identifying, training and mentoring future leaders. We were looking at some dire projections at attrition levels in our experienced workforce. Retirements, resignations, disabilities, etc.  everything that could affect our ability to ensure a well-trained and educated workforce presently and in the future.

            The management team of the department which consisted of the Manager and all of his direct reports which included the Superintendent and his Line Supervisors met and developed a plan of action to develop training, identification of future leaders and how to train and mentor them. The Manager and Superintendent took on the task of developing the roster of all of the individuals in the department, segmenting them by job classification, age, years of service, projected retirement dates and plugged everything into an excel spreadsheet. The rest of us supervisors met to discuss potential leaders in all of the departments, what methodology we would use and also how to help our existing foremen become better leaders in order to ensure that they would be able to communicate to the rest of the troops the goals of the leadership team.

            Once the spreadsheet was fully developed we had a leadership meeting with the Manager and Superintendent, a projector with the spreadsheet projected on to a screen showed how challenging the attrition levels and drop in experience would be, particularly amongst the baby boomers. With all of us gathered we began to put some numbers and revise the existing assumptions about individuals based on each supervisor’s knowledge of their department and those workers. At the time I was in charge of the meter and service department, this department had two-man crews performing installations of overhead and underground services and meter sets. This department was where our more experienced (Older linemen) would eventually end up since the tasks weren’t as physically challenging as being on a line crew. That being said, this group of workers had decades of experience that couldn’t be replaced with any amount of training, it’s like the old saying “No one is born with a beard.”         Additionally, with these seasoned veterans I had some internal challenges in this department. The years of doing linework had taken a huge toll on these guys, I spent a lot of time filling out workers compensation forms for present and past injuries, these guys were smart they knew that by doing this they could get their medical issues taken care of by the company, before they retired. It’s like I tell companies, you might as well hand out the workers comp forms the first day you hire a person to be lineman because you will eventually have “repetitive injuries” based on doing years of physical labor under some extreme conditions.

            Other things that we had to adjust for was the transition of experienced linemen moving from the line crew to becoming inspectors. As the private sector was building at a very fast rate we couldn’t keep up with the production using our own internal resources and had to contract out work, more contractors equal more inspectors. More inspectors mean linemen moving from the crews to the inspection department.

            As our meetings progressed we needed to develop a plan for hiring more apprentices on a continual cycle to meet the attrition levels that we were experiencing and the tidal wave that was going to come based on the future projections. I’m not talking about some distance time frame like decades in the future, we were looking at annual losses of key personnel within a few years that would have been detrimental to our ability to replace them with new hires. It takes at least 4-years to get a new hire from 1^st step apprentice to journeyman level in most organizations. A brand new journeyman still requires several years of seasoning in order to be proficient and skillful in order to provide the optimum levels of safety and productivity.

Summary:

There really isn’t enough space in this article for me to detail all of the goals and objectives we set out to achieve. However, with a lot of hard work, and support from our manager, and the executives above him, we were able to create a well-thought out plan, budgets and access resources to achieve our mission of succession planning.

T&D World Leadership – Ask Max – Succession Planning