The potential for losing tech talent is on the rise these days. Thanks to an uptick in IT hiring and an increase in retirements among baby boomers, your A-team employee lineup may be in danger.
Rather than being caught without star performers, tech management must constantly think in terms of bench depth and grooming the key players of tomorrow, CIOs and other experts say. But with so much on IT managers’ plates these days, it can be hard to make succession planning a top priority.
However, while “succession planning” or “bench strength” may not resonate much with IT managers, the concept of “risk mitigation” does, says Diane Morello, managing vice president of Gartner’s executive leadership and innovation group in Stamford, Conn.
When put in terms of what’s at risk — the smooth operation and future development of IT systems that are indispensable to the company — IT managers become more willing to make the time to identify rising stars and provide the necessary training, education and mentoring for tomorrow’s leaders. And once that priority is established at the CIO level, Morello says, succession planning more easily becomes a priority throughout the rest of the department.
IT especially vulnerable to talent loss
At Prudential Financial, CIO Barbara Koster is keenly aware of the risk to the IT department’s credibility should some key talent retire or be hired away.
“Succession planning in the IT department is critical, because you want to make sure the business is always prepared and protected. We can never be in a position where we’re leaving the business worried about getting the support they need,” says Koster, who is based in Newark, N.J., and manages some 2,200 tech employees in the U.S. “You want the business to feel very confident that you have it covered.”
Succession planning is particularly important in high tech because the field is so specialized, CIOs say. The high level of technical expertise often required for IT jobs limits the potential talent pool when managers are looking to hire internally from another department.
And often IT leaders will find that a proportion of workers with a certain set of skills — Web development, system architecture, network design — aren’t interested in developing the soft skills and other nontechnical qualifications required for a management position.
“IT skills and people skills don’t really go together, so it becomes hard to identify and develop those soft skills,” says Dan McCarthy, a corporate leadership developer who writes the Great Leadership blog.
To be sure, high performers who don’t want to move into management are still essential to the organization, and management experts say the key to retaining such employees is to ensure that they receive support and training in the latest technologies and are given interesting, challenging projects.
As for the employees who do show leadership potential, McCarthy and other industry watchers recommend that IT managers scout them out early in their careers and begin bringing them along accordingly. Here are some other tips for adding depth to your IT bench.
Go deep to identify talent
The key to maintaining departmentwide continuity and reliability is identifying not just the stars of tomorrow, but going a few levels deeper to scope out employees with the potential to step up to the plate years from now.
At Prudential, as part of the company’s succession planning and management program, IT and other managers are instructed to look for three types of rising stars: next-generation leaders who currently exhibit the required skills to take the next step into management; emerging leaders who have good technical skills and, with grooming, could become leaders within a few years; and employees who work well with management and in teams — those with soft skills that can grow into full-blown management potential.
Equally important is recognizing those skilled workers who want to advance in the company, but not through management — for example a junior Web developer who wants to amass the training and experience to become a senior Web developer, or an application developer who is looking for a new challenge and wants to learn different IT skills. While these employees aren’t on the management track, they still require care and feeding.
“Some people say, ‘I really don’t have the desire to manage, I really just want to hone my technical skills,’ or ‘I really love being a Web developer,’ and if that’s what they want to do, you have to respect that,” says Koster. “Putting them into something they don’t want to do can hurt them.”
IT leadership works on filling in gaps by providing potential managers with appropriate training, education and mentoring, says Koster. The multitasking millennial generation, for example, has much to contribute, but also much to learn. “The way they multitask is phenomenal; it increases productivity,” says Koster. “We’re incorporating things [from them] and putting those into the Prudential model. But they’re also learning about the [company’s] history and how our products work.
“There’s a lot of older technology that the younger generation isn’t learning in school,” she adds, “so we need to prepare training programs for them to pick up that older technology.” Koster offers the example of Cobol programming, which the company’s IT systems are still heavily dependent on. “Many of our systems run on legacy environments. For us, it’s a big issue. When you sell someone an insurance policy, that policy is for a lifetime.” And so Cobol is one area Prudential’s IT department focuses training on.
There’s at least one hidden benefit of nurturing multiple layers of potential leaders at different stages in their careers. If the company decides to change its business focus, management can leverage new IT talent quickly and reassign positions to support that new emphasis, says Koster. “You think you’re operating with one set of objectives, but things change,” she says. “You need to know your talent very well throughout the year if you’re going to put a team together quickly.”
Great Leadership’s McCarthy says that filling the benches shouldn’t be an in-house-only activity. He urges managers to build a “virtual bench” outside the organizational ranks.
“A lot of companies are encouraging managers, developers or top sales reps to be recruiting all the time, to have a virtual bench, so if your star player gets called up, you’ve got a folder of people outside of the company — people you’ve been having lunch with, networking with, touching base with on a regular basis — so that you’ve got candidates lined up,” says McCarthy.
Guard against employee overconfidence
Employees at Atlanta-based Southern Co., which produces energy and owns electric utilities in four states, tend to spend their entire careers there, says CIO Becky Blalock. That happens at a lot of utility companies, she notes.
While this continuity benefits the company, the downside is that entire swaths of people can end up retiring at the same time, says Blalock. Currently, the average age among the company’s 1,100-strong IT staff is 44, and many workers are reaching the minimum retirement age, which can be as early as 50 with the appropriate accredited service.
To deal with retirement and other staffing changes, the company has what Blalock describes as a very robust succession-planning process. For example, every year Blalock is asked by her superiors to list five employees who could replace her “if I’m run over by a truck tomorrow,” she says. She breaks this list into potential replacements who are ready today, and those who would be ready in a year or two.
“I have some people on my team on that list that are very talented. They could walk in and no one would miss me,” Blalock says. “I like to think I’m irreplaceable, but I’m not.”
As part of the succession planning process, Southern’s management informs employees who have been earmarked for a future leadership position about its plans for them. Such moves can backfire if the staffer becomes overconfident, but it’s better than investing time in training and grooming an employee who doesn’t really have an interest in taking on a leadership role, says Blalock.
“We tell them there are no guarantees or promises, this is just an opportunity,” she says. Rising stars are enrolled in the company’s leadership development programs and are given mentors to help them get the corporate coaching they need to move up.
Blalock also encourages employees in her department to take positions in different parts of the company to help them learn the business. If they return to the IT department at a later point, they’ll bring that deeper understanding with them, she says.
At executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles in Chicago, CIO Alwin Brunner says he doesn’t explicitly let people on his staff know that they’re being groomed for leadership positions. Instead, he focuses on making sure that potential future managers get the training and education required to make the leap.
“For example, I have a director who is very bright and very good, and when we talk about her future, we plan her training, professional education and experience, but I don’t say explicitly, ‘You’re a high-performance employee,’ ” explains Brunner, who has been CIO at Heidrick & Struggles for about a year but has dealt with succession planning in previous positions as well. Brunner believes it’s not prudent to make promises about employees’ futures, since he can’t guarantee he’ll still be in a position to promote them down the road.
Have your say
Should you tell star employees they’re on the management track?
His caution is particularly apt these days. The IT department at Heidrick & Struggles is currently in transition — outsourcing will dwindle its ranks from its current 65 employees down to 43 once the transformation is over, says Brunner. Because of this transition, succession planning in the IT department isn’t as high a priority as it should be, he says, although he does want to make sure there are clear plans for the employees who will remain with the company, in order to promote retention and ensure some continuity.
Heidrick & Struggles’ IT department isn’t alone; many organizations have a hard time prioritizing succession planning as more pressing problems pile up.
“We are similar to any other IT organization; we get distracted by the immediate,” says Dennis Aebersold, vice president for IT and CIO at the University of Oklahoma. “Still, succession planning and organizational development will always be high on my agenda. Our development programs, combined with the coaching that supports those programs, make succession planning a continual process for us.”
Learn to spot a good bench player
One aspect of succession planning that isn’t difficult is spotting up-and-comers in the organization, says Aebersold.
“If you asked my team how I identify rising stars, they would all say one word: sparkle. How do you identify sparkle? You just know it,” says Aebersold, who is in charge of the university’s CIO Rising Stars program, which aims to identify two individuals each year who, with exposure to IT leadership, could become leaders themselves.
These employees attend leadership team meetings and are involved in discussions about staff development, strategic planning, organizational priorities, and planning and building key relationships.
In addition, the university offers development programs for training and formal coaching, where IT professionals are appointed to lead peer coaching groups. And separately, the university’s internship program gives student employees hands-on experience in areas such as ERP, database management, mobile development, networking and security, says Aebersold.
Heidrick & Struggles’ Brunner says he hasn’t run into a situation where he was grooming someone for advancement who turned out not to be interested. “You pick the people for leadership who are volunteering for new assignments. You can see it and feel it when you dialog with them,” he says.
Future leaders “are passionate and hungry to learn more — and not just about technology,” agrees Aebersold. “These are people who constantly expand their experiences and are not afraid to step outside of their comfort zone.”
If you’re still tempted to let succession planning slide to the bottom of your to-do list, consider this: IT organizations that encourage layers of succession planning and workforce development enjoy more success as a department, says Gartner’s Morello. And CIOs who emphasize strategic workforce development tend to be highly successful executives, while those who don’t make it a priority score much lower, Morello says, based on her firm’s studies.
If you want to be a winning tech exec, in other words, you need a good team to back you up.
Frequent contributor Cara Garretson is a freelance writer in the Washington, D.C., area. She can be reached at caragarretson@gmail.com.
