Your biggest Continuity Challenge/Opportunity – Your Leaders

As a college senior, I had a conversation with a fraternity brother that, decades later, still shines as a revelation in continuity. He and I were reviewing the new pledge class, and he asked, “Which of these will be ready to be Chapter President in three years?”

“How am I supposed to know THAT?” I asked in reply.

“If you can’t point to two or three now who might be ready, then our recruitment this semester isn’t complete.”

He was right, of course. A healthy college fraternity turns over its membership completely every four years. Who would we be preparing to take the reins after we were gone?

#Leadership is always a revolving door. The best leaders move up, within your organization or, if there are insufficient opportunities within, they move elsewhere. Eventually they retire. No matter how good your retention program is (a subject for other articles), turnover will happen.

When leaders move on, all too often, invaluable information leaves with them. Sure, HR has the job description, but it doesn’t mention the secret sauce of leadership: knowing when to do what, and with whom.

#ContinuityofOperations plans are miles deep in alternate facilities, as if most business couldn’t be run out of the local Starbucks or, as we proved for the last three years, at home.

Most continuity plans skim over the threat of losing your most important business asset – your people.

And yet, here we are in year three of “#TheGreatResignation” and facing retirement of the last of the boomers, the #burnout of cops and nurses and damn near everyone. How are you preparing?

The first continuity project we conducted was an executive continuity plan for a four-person regional #HealthcareCoalition that did the work of ten people. While they all had titles -- Executive Director, Regional Healthcare Coordinator Center Manager, Training and Exercise Director, Vulnerable Populations Coordinator -- the special sauce that made everything work was the cooperation and interaction between each of them, and between them and their stakeholders. Each had contacts and techniques, and virtually none of them were written down.

But what if one of them left? How would the others know what to do, and how to do it? That’s what our project documented. Two of them did leave within the next year, for important statewide positions. The organization continues to thrive, partly because they built a plan for turnover.

“Leadership” and “Staff” are two of the four pillars of continuity. (“Facilities” and “Communications and Technology” are the other two, and where most COOP plans expend most of their ink.) But you wouldn’t know how important leadership is if you studied FEMA doctrine. Since I have just completed the training needed for my certification as a #MasterContinuityPractitioner, I have downloaded and reviewed, if not memorized, the #FEMA library of continuity doctrine and guides. Of the 1,330 pages total, 4 are devoted to the two pillars of “Leadership” and “Staff.” ??Almost two-thirds of the page count is focused on physical structures.

Losing staff is wholly unlike the continuity problem of lost buildings or machines. You have specifications for buildings and equipment. If you need to replace them, you know exactly what to order. When a key leader leaves, you have no idea the full implications of that loss, because you don’t have a complete understanding of that leader’s influence on staff, on process, and on culture. (It probably extends far beyond the unit they led.) You can’t just order up another “Vice President who was as effective as Sandy.” In fact, the needs of the organization have probably morphed recently, and you need to know what every leader is doing, so you can balance the workload temporarily, and then know what knowledge, skills, and attitudes you need to hire next. With a good continuity program, that person may already be in your organization.

The way to prepare your organization for this inevitable loss is to fully document not only Mission Essential Functions, but to capture the “special sauce” that each leader contributes to the process. An executive continuity plan is an essential part of continuity of operations.

Tell me in the comments how your organization is prepared for the retirements you can predict in the near future. If you can’t explain it, then let’s talk about starting here with your continuity planning.