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Succession Planning for Public Health Agencies: A Three-Part Webinar Series

Join ASTHO for a dynamic three-part webinar series designed to equip public health agencies with the tools and insights needed to build a resilient, future-ready workforce. Succession planning is a critical component of workforce development, ensuring continuity, leadership growth, and organizational stability. Through practical strategies and real-world examples, this series will help agencies align succession planning with broader workforce goals and prepare for long-term success.

Succession Planning Part 1 of 3: Building the Case for Succession Planning

This first session introduces the foundational concepts of succession planning, including what it is and what it is not. Explore how succession planning aligns with agency goals, workforce development strategies, and other system-wide drivers. The session also covers the key roles and responsibilities of a strong succession planning team.

Speakers

Joy Ermie, Health Commissioner, Henry County Health Department
Tiffany Day, Public Health Specialist, Henry County Health Department

Resource

Succession Planning Part 1 of 3: Presentation Slides (PDF)

This text is based on live transcription. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART), captioning, and/or live transcription are provided to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. This text is not to be distributed or used in any way that may violate copyright law.

A.C. ROTHENBUECHER:
Welcome, everyone! I'm gonna give folks just one more minute to hop on for our ASTHO Connect Succession Planning Series.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to ASTHO Connect's Succession Planning Part 1, Building the Case for Succession Planning.

I'm A.C. Rothenbucher, Director of Workforce, and on behalf of ASTHO, we're so excited to have you here with us today.

We're so excited about the first session in our three-part series on succession planning for public health agencies.

Over the next three sessions, we'll explore practical strategies and insights to help you align succession planning with broader workforce development goals.

Today, we'll start by building a strong foundation, looking at what succession planning is and what it's not, and how it connects to agency priorities and the roles and responsibilities of a strong succession planning team.

For those who may be new to us, ASTHO is the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. We are a nonprofit organization committed to supporting the work of state and territorial public health officials, and furthering the development and excellence of public health policy nationwide.

This webinar series is offered as a part of the Public Health Infrastructure Grant, or FIG, as some of you may know of it.

This effort and this investment invests in strengthening foundational workforce capacity, systems, and infrastructure across public health.

And with us today, we couldn't be more excited and grateful to have our guest speakers from Henry County Health Department in Ohio. We have Joy Ermey and Tiffany Day.

Joy is a health… is the health commissioner of HCHD. She's a graduate of the University of Rochester. She began her career in the medical device and pharmaceutical independent testing industry, where she built a strong foundation in quality assurance, quality improvement, training, and public speaking.

And after earning her Bachelor's of Public Health, she joined the Henry County Health Department in 2014 as a public information officer and health educator. And this role provided her with invaluable experience working directly with residents and deepen her connection to the community.

We also have Tiffany Day, a public health specialist at Henry County Health Department. She previously held positions as a Help Me Grow Home visitor and the Human Resource Manager. She earned her Bachelor's degree in psychology from Defiance College and Master's of Public Health from Benedict University.

She began serving as the project manager of HCHD's workforce development and succession plans while in her HR position and continues to guide these projects today.

So, we're about to get started. We wanted to give you a couple notes about logistics. So, we are in webinar format.

You can use the chat function, the Q&A function. We will have some Slido polls and engagement throughout the presentation, and we'll speak to how you can access that. So please feel free to drop your questions in chats, and we'll be monitoring those.

And so, to start us off, we would love for you to add in the chat… Your name, your role, and your jurisdiction.

And with that, I will turn it over to Joy and Tiffany.

Thank you.

TIFFANY DAY:
Okay, well, I'm very excited to get underway with our succession planning. I enjoy sharing succession planning with everybody. It tends to be a newer topic, and so let's talk about what we are going to be learning together, throughout the three sessions. What we really want to do is distinguish succession planning from other types of planning.

We are going to explain the value of succession planning in public health agencies.

Identify key roles and stages in the succession planning process, and we're going to describe how to align the core competencies for public health professionals to job descriptions and performance reviews.

And for today, specifically, we will be looking at defining succession planning, explaining why succession planning is crucial for your agency's short- and long-term effective operations, and we're going to identify key roles and responsibilities of those who are on your succession planning team.

So, before we dive in, and you can, just kind of think about this. If you want to make some comments in the chat, of course, always feel free to, but I just have a question that I want you to consider.

Can you replace your leadership team in 20 days? So if you think of your health department, and you consider the effects of a valuable management team member, let's say your health commissioner or director, maybe it's, your Don, your finance director, even a grant manager, think about one of these position holders leaving your team. What kind of challenges would this create for your agencies? For your agency's structure, For your agency's operations, for your agency's processes.

And maybe this has happened to you, where you have, you know, sort of unexpectedly found out you were losing a very valuable team member.

And that's really what we want to address with the succession plan. It's, it's, it's… really taking into account our own approaches in public health, right? We're all about prevention and mitigation, and that's exactly what we're looking to do, but in terms of our workforce and in terms of our training.

So… Succession planning typically involves the same key tasks, and we've broken them into six… these six phases. This is what we've been working with. We are talking about preparation, alignment, analysis.

Strategy, implementation, and evaluation.

We worked through these phases.

But we also made them our own. So succession plants can come in different sizes, shapes, forms. A lot of that depends on your organization, how you're structured, how you're composed, right? So, what I want you to do is hear what we have to say.

Consider the tools and resources that we talk about and provide, and then feel free to adapt and make them work for your organization. I think sometimes when we look at the systems work, it's so heady, and it's so kind of up here, right? And… and I know initially my approach was very concrete and very black and white thinking, but they say, after this step, I do this step.

once I gave myself the free pass to sort of take it and make it work for us.

everything started to come together. So I really want you to be able to come with that approach, too. Not everything we have done or said may be a perfect fit for you, and that's totally okay. It's totally okay.

So, also, when you look at these, phases that we have, I want you to also keep in mind that they can overlap.

But they can also build on top of each other.

there, again, really is not a concrete black and white design to each freight… to each phase. So keep it simple, and don't try it all at once. It might start to feel like this is a lot, and honestly.

it really sort of is a lot. There's a lot to initially learning succession planning. If it were super easy, everybody would do it, and they don't. But they should, so I'm glad that you're here to start out with this.

But I want you to remember, too, that as you go through succession planning, as you do this first time through, that this is very, very much a pilot phase, and I want you to have the expectation that this first time through is going to take 12, to 36 months. This is a long process, but I kind of think about, you know, tortoise and hare, right? We can be fast, and you get what you get. We can take it back a little bit and really work our ways through it, and maybe we'll get that win instead.

That's where I'm aiming for. So, if you look at these, phases that we have, today in our class, we're really gonna focus on those first two.

Preparation and alignment. So today, we're really going to try to dive deep into understanding what succession planning is, and how it's going to benefit your organization, and then we're going to do some alignment of the succession plan. We want it to align and fit in with our other plans and strategic goals and operations from our organization.

So, phase one, preparation. You are here. This is exactly where we… we start out, and you're right where you need to be. This one is all about learning and understanding succession planning and how it benefits your agency, and then being able to take that information and share it with your senior leadership.

This can be a very, very long phase. What we found was that true understanding comes through practice, consistency, and review.

So you might be coming back to a lot of these initial concepts again and again as you and your team master the process, and that's okay.

I know that Joy and I both had the experience as we were leading our team through, that, you know, we would have… would be several meetings into our succession planning, and a question might pop up that was literally something I covered in the very first meeting, but that's okay, because that's how learning works, right? So, I just really want to get into this mindset of.

This is not going to be an instantaneous fast thing that everybody picks up on and really gets that buy-in right away for.

So as we think about succession planning, and just sort of getting an idea of where we are to start, we're going to ask you a couple of questions. We're going to do these on a Slido poll. I'm giving you a second to know what they both are so that you can think about it, and then we'll get into the Slido. So the first thing I want you to think about is.

do you do succession planning at your organization? And there may be a few different ways you can think about answering this. It may be a yes, and you have a standardized process, or it may be a yes, but you don't know much about the process. It could be a flat no, we have not started any of this yet, and maybe you just don't know yet, and that's okay, too? And then the second question is, do you have experience with creating a succession plan? And that might be a yes, a no, and maybe you say, well, yeah, but I don't even really know what I did and how I got myself through it. So, we're coming to the link, Jessica, right, to the poll right now.

So, here we go. We have, we're gonna do the QR code, which of course is going to stay as we start seeing the results for that first question of, do you have experience creating a succession plan? So, it looks like we have… We have a lot of no's and a few yeses.

Good! Alright! I love this.

And again, you can scan that QR code, or you can go to slido.com and enter number 120, and I lost the rest of it. It's in the chat, though.

1209728, and I think Leslie is putting that in the chat.

And we have some very honest people, which I value and appreciate, that say, yeah, I've… I've been… I've been a part of experiencing creating the plan, but I don't really understand it. And, I'm not gonna lie, I felt… I felt that way for quite a while as I was trying to lead this, so… so you're definitely not alone.

Okay, it looks like everybody… Pretty much, it doesn't look like anybody's actively working on that one, so we'll go to that… oops, we'll go to that. Did I miss the first one? There it is! I did skip over it. Okay. Do you do the succession planning? No. So, just over half, don't do any at all, and then another 20% do not know.

Yes, but I don't know the process, and then we do have 12% saying they have a standardized process.

Nice! Okay, so this is, I hope, going to be very beneficial for everybody, and we'll get some new… new information that can be useful for you guys moving forward.

So, the majority has said that, that you don't have, experience with that, and I just want to reiterate that I had no experience when I was first assigned the task of creating the succession plan.

So, I can relate and be empathetic to a little of that panic that some people might have, being told, you need to do this. But remember.

It is okay to not have experience, or to not know much about it.

Because this is literally the learning phase. So again, we're at the exact spot that we need to be at.

The first thing that I really advise doing is getting a subject matter expert, or a SME, and actually, I would suggest that this person not be HR, and not necessarily be a part of that senior leadership team or management, because you'll want somebody who really Doesn't have a lot of, input and time in growing the staff.

They're going to focus on being the succession plan expert. Your leadership, your management, your directors can be the ones that are going to dig deeper into the individuals who are a part of it.

I became our SME. I took a really fantastic webinar that was through NACCHO and the Ohio State University, and I watched it over and over and over, and I read the guidebook. I can't even tell you how many times, and I still go back into that guidebook. So, all of this is in our references at the end, so if that's something you're interested in, you can always do that, too.

I'm not gonna lie, I still continue to Google and research things about succession planning, even as I'm preparing, you know, the webinar, thinking, what can we do to take it up another notch and make this a little bit better for our team and for you guys? So, as we think about succession planning, what prevents us from implementing a succession plan? Right? Because I think a lot of times our knee-jerk reaction is, no, I'm not going to do that, and as the picture says, it's super easy to come up with reasons to not do something. It's a little bit harder to really come up with the reasons to do it, and then follow through.

But like I said, with public health, right? We are all about response, and we are very used to focusing on urgent needs, especially for our smaller health departments. It seems like there's always something cooking and popping up, right? So who has time to worry about some of this kind of stuff? Especially if I'm telling you it's going to take up to 36 months to do? You know, in public health, that's not typically how we operate.

It's hard to find the time. We have tons of mounting pressures and duties that are going on. A lot of times we have individuals on our staff who are holding multiple roles, so adding another thing on the plate can be difficult.

People just don't seem to get it. They don't really understand succession planning, and the purpose behind it, and why. It can be very confusing to understand. And again, that time required, that delay in results, when you have to wait two to three years to see those long-term benefits, it can be very challenging.

So, of course, we like to, in, you know, the grant management world, right, we talk about barriers, so… Ultimately, that lack of time, the lack of people, the lack of money, these can all be some of those barriers that make it very difficult to get a successful, succession plan underway, right? as you make your case for succession planning, we want to try to balance or counter those barriers. We're going to address them, hopefully, right? So, what are the reasons to have a succession plan? Why are we going to do it? Why are we here today, ultimately? Vacancies are gonna happen. That's a fact of life. Even if you are the absolute best, most number one place in the whole world to work.

Somebody's probably going to leave for one reason or another.

Succession planning helps you to prepare, especially for vacancies in your critical roles.

So if you think about when somebody leaves their position, it's typical to give a 2-week notice. Maybe in management, it's going to be 30 days. That's a month. That's 4 weeks.

Is that still really enough time? To gather up all of the, the SOPs or the SOGs that need to be made, your guidelines, your standard operating procedures, to capture the knowledge that the person who is leaving is taking with them, to implement maybe some job shadowing or some training plans.

Succession planning is really all about thoughtful, deliberate.

Staff development, so that you can retain valuable employees, and that you're better able to recruit valuable employees.

Think about, too, your reputation. We work really hard to have a good reputation in our communities.

And to have a good reputation as an employer. You know, we have these sites like Glassdoor and whatnot, and just think about, too, how that reputation can increase when you have this engaged staff that knows that you are putting effort into their training and their development.

And remember, future, future employees Are interviewing us just as much as we're interviewing them in today's world.

So, ways that you can do this, how are you going to keep that staff and engage them? That's a part of why we're gonna do the succession planning.

Community partners can retain… retain our trust.

And ultimately, within our own staff, it motivates employees to expand their skills with development opportunities that are provided in your plan.

That, in turn, is going to incre- create or increase and foster engagement, as well as a culture of growth and opportunity.

And if you are following at all some of these new workplace wellness, initiatives, employee mental health plans, they talk a lot about psychological safety.

And having a culture of growth and opportunity and putting development back into your staff is a critical foundational piece of having psychological safety at the workplace.

So, this is feeding into all kinds of different angles as you start thinking about what are the benefits and why I should do succession planning.

And again.

It's internal, but we don't want to forget those external candidates as well, because this is going to save you on recruitment costs, it's going to minimize those delays in hiring, and hopefully it's going to help you feed into, obtaining those future leaders that you're looking for, whether they come externally or internally.

So you can, again, secure that new talent that could be coming in.

And you can ensure that the agency can keep on operating, even in challenging circumstances. And a lot of us are very familiar with extremely challenging circumstances in the last few years, and especially during that pandemic, right? So, I think at first blush, succession planning may seem very costly, but when you really do that benefit analysis on it, it's saving you money. It's going to save you money in recruiting, in interviewing, in training.

But despite all of these benefits, only 35% of businesses have formulated a succession plan process and have it in place. That's including the private sector. So I think just the fact that you guys are here, you're looking into this, you're learning, you want to know more, you want to do a plan.

that speaks volumes of how you are really, ultimately, on the cutting edge of this work… this piece of workforce development. So I think, really, give yourself a pat on the back, especially with all of the things that are on our plates that you're carving out all of this time for this.

But I really, again, want to go back to that it's very important to consider the concerns and consider the benefits so that that can help you make the case for your business plan, for your succession plan.

That is going to help you to get your buy-in from senior management, from leadership, and ultimately from the whole staff.

I want you to think of it like it's internal marketing for your priority stakeholders.

It's a sales pitch, really. So hopefully, I've given you a really good sales pitch on… on why this is so important, and why you should do it. And then it's going to continue on, because I got more, but wait, there's more that I can tell you, right? Okay, so succession planning, we're talking a little bit about it. What is succession planning? What is not succession planning? Succession planning is not about just picking out some people and tell them that, you're gonna get a promotion when there's a vacancy, or you have the potential for this.

It's really going to do a couple of things here. It is a systematic method for preparing future leaders and mission-critical practitioners to compete for positions as they become available.

So you're gonna really look at your organization, and what is the talent that you have in it.

And what are the needs that you have, and how they align to your goals, and we're going to look at a separate thing. So we're looking at one, we're gonna look at people, the people on our staff, and we're gonna look at what their potential is.

And then the other side of the piece is we're looking at key positions. We want to know who… what What roles at our health department are at highest risk for a vacancy? And then we're gonna put a plan in place to try to create a pipeline of potential people that can fill those positions.

When they do become vacant.

And we're going to try to come up with some plans, training plans, developmental plans, essentially, that is going to help guide those people we've identified on staff with the potential So that they can get the skills that they, as an individual, may be missing or could use more development, so that they are better prepared to potentially fill that vacancy when it happens.

Again, succession planning is a process.

Consider it like a sub-plan of the workforce development plan, and it's all about building that talent pool.

And then that's going to help guide your training needs. So what we really need to do is we are going to determine the SCAS, the skills, the knowledge, the abilities that are required of a potentially vacant position.

And in the succession plan, we're going to consider all of those SCAS, all of those skills that are needed, those SCA competencies, but we also want to include our public health core competencies.

And then we can make that connection of how our core competencies are useful and needed, and what those specific duties or processes are that fall under those core competencies. So then we can start building up people with those skills. We want all of these SCAS and competencies determined for our mission-critical positions, so we're going to determine what those are.

And those can change. They're not going to be the same at every health department. They can vary from health department to health department. They can vary from year to year, or succession plan to succession plan, but that's part of the process, is determining those.

And in succession planning, those mission-critical roles, we refer to those as key positions, and we're going to talk lots more about those in our next class. And Joy is going to tell you a little bit more in a few minutes more about how we can tie in those core competencies and all of that alignment piece.

So it will come together. I don't always love when I sit in a webinar or class, and I'm being told the whole time, and then we're gonna tell you this, and then we're gonna tell you this, I think. Why are you telling me what you're gonna tell me? Just tell me things. So I don't want to be that guy.

But it's coming! So, when, we started this out, we had really thought that we were already working on succession planning.

We thought we were doing it in a more informal, kind of a low-key kind of way.

But what we soon discovered was what we were really doing was replacement planning.

And they're not the same thing at all. Replacement planning, some of those key differences are, that replacement planning is usually on an emergency and or temporary basis. So… let's say, you know, something horrible, there was a car accident, and now you have a staff member who's going to be out for several weeks, or perhaps somebody went on FML for one reason or another, right? And so you… maybe unexpectedly have this opening, or maybe it's something you knew was going to be coming, a scheduled surgery, or having a baby, or something like that. But it's temporary, so it's going to be emergency, it's going to be temporary. The structure of your organization is not going to be changing.

And really, in replacement planning, you're focusing mostly on duties. It's about making sure the job gets done, not a further in-depth sort of thing, and again, it's not going to be permanent. And also, a lot of those duties could be split up off over, you know, many different staff members. Maybe if it's a nurse, you know, maybe one's covering the vaccine piece, and another one's covering, disease piece, and that sort of thing.

And that is what we found we had been mostly working on, because we were very focused on doing a lot of cross-training, and again, working a lot on, oh, we want to get standard operating procedures, or standard operating guidelines down. And we thought, oh, isn't that great? We're doing all this succession planning.

Okay, well, it's not succession planning, it's replacement planning.

But I do want to stress that replacement planning is also super important. You have to have replacement planning. You have to be prepared to have an emergency and a temporary replacement, right? So that those duties can continue. But… But I want you to remember that in succession planning, it's a permanent vacancy that's coming, and it's about skilling up, it's about training up team members.

Keep in mind, in replacement planning.

It could be a mission-critical role, or a key position.

But again, it's going to fall under these different types of categories of temporary replacement and whatnot.

Okay, so if that's replacement planning, then what in the world am I talking about when I'm talking about succession planning? With succession planning, you are creating a process for internal promotions, and you're also creating a plan for yourself for external hires. So it's a systematic method for planning future leaders.

Succession planning lets your staff know that your agency wants to invest in them, that you want to help them grow and develop, especially your engaged, driven employees.

And remember, one of the biggest costs to… to our organizations is our people. We spend a lot of money on our staff, and we want to support this investment. So, just like anything else that you're investing in, you buy property, you're not going to just let it sit and be a house for you. You're going to want to continue to invest in it and maintain it, and probably make it even better.

We know we have an aging workforce.

So we know we're gonna have pending retirements.

We know, in public health, our programs are always changing, so we may potentially need some different skill sets on the horizon than what we have right now.

And we also know from, you know, feedback from PHWINS, the last 2 or 3 of the PH WINS data sets have come out, and our future projections is that we have workforce shortages.

So when we do get engaged, driven staff members, we don't want to lose them. I want them to stay here with us, because we've already, invested in that.

So again.

As you make this case for why you should do succession planning, as you make this case for yourself.

as you make this case maybe for your board members, as you make this case for your senior leadership management, so that they get buy-in, I want you to really consider the costs of not having a succession plan.

Think about the hiring process.

And the costs of that.

the time, the literal money, maybe if you do advertising, but you have to do interviewing. You have to do training. Then you've got coverage time, right? You're probably pulling staff to help do the duties of that vacated spot for a while in your replacement planning.

Plus, you have management's time being pulled away while they review resumes, and do interviews, and call, you know, on references and all of that.

So then, not only do you have that expense of just the time and what you're paying people and doing that work, but then think about how those double duties can impact. You not only have the time away, but then you're putting extra work and stress on your staff members.

Who are probably, let's be honest, in public health, they're probably already doing more than on paper we probably should, right? So all of that can impact the staff morale, and it can also lead to burnout of your other staff. And we know we have a burnout problem in public health right now. It's getting better, but we still have it.

So again, think about those gains, think about what you are getting by having a succession plan, and I love this slide because I'm an incredibly visual person, so I love how it's kind of organized out into these different groups.

So, the gains, the whys, the benefits that we've discussed, and the impact on all of your stakeholders.

I'm not going to read through all of them, but really to kind of summarize, you've got those for the agency, those organizational benefits of developing skills and creating that pipeline of potential future leaders. You've got those employee benefits we've talked about.

Where they get that transparency, and their voice, and their own developmental goals.

And again, just as a little side note, things like transparency and, having a voice and a choice, those are huge factors in increasing resiliency and adapting to change. And those are two things you definitely need in public health workforce staff members, right? And then in that third column, which I barely touched on, but I really love thinking about this concept, because this one was super new to me. I hadn't thought outside the box like this coming into it. Those community and partner benefits. And I really want to stress those community benefits, because I feel here at our health department, partnerships are the cornerstone. They're one of the big cornerstones to our success.

And we don't want our reputation impacted because a veteran employee has left, and they took all of their knowledge with them. So when you're able to maintain that knowledge transfer, it's going to bring reliability, efficiency, you're going to have this confirmed high service Quality, that… that continuous quality, right? and trust.

Your community is going to be able to keep their trust in your organization, because you're going to be consistent, you're going to be dependable, and honestly, how important is trust in public health? Always, but especially now more than ever, right? So I think you can, again, tie these benefits through so many different, Aspects of, of, of your organization and the ways that this can be beneficial.

So… Obviously, not all staff are going to be identified as participants in the succession plan, even if they might be part of replacement planning. And even if they're a fantastic staff member, succession planning just may not be, for them at this time. It might not be the appropriate place for them, but hopefully by now, you've started asking yourselves, if you are doing succession planning, or replacement planning or both, and again, you definitely want to have both. I don't want it to sound like I'm knocking replacement planning. You gotta have replacement planning too, right? This is a brief assessment from Sigma, which is a great resource don't get paid to promote them, but I am giving them credit where credit's due. And this, I think, can be a really great tool for determining where you are in the process.

I know the slide itself is very small and difficult to read, but you should have this in your handout resources, so you'll be able to take a closer look at it, and just kind of score yourself. I know some questions pertain a little bit more to the private sector, but I think we can still use this as a tool in our toolbox, and we can make it work for us in terms of our needs and, you know, eyeballing where we are, what we've done, and what we need to do moving forward So then we want to start thinking about, alright, I've researched succession planning, you're going to finish up this course with us, you're going to be the SME, or if you're maybe the director, you might get somebody in to kind of guide this for you. Then now you're going to want to create your team, right? Definitely need to have your health commissioner or your director on this team.

I can't imagine trying to do this without your Don, without your lead in your fiscal department. You're probably going to want your… all of your senior management or your department heads as a part of this. If you have, if you're so lucky to have an HR department, you're probably going to want your HR head involved. And then depending on your size, you may be looking at some other, team members To make it a little more robust.

Our team, we are a very small health department. We have about 40 people on staff, so for us, this was very easy-peasy. It was not a big thinker, it was kind of mindless. It was just, we're going to do our management team, which is comprised of our department heads. So, depending on your needs, if you're a little bit bigger, maybe you want to have, if you know there's a vacancy coming, maybe you want that incumbent person on your team.

Or maybe you want that person's direct manager, if you have some more middle management type roles.

So as we did this, I became the SME, And I would suggest, again, that you do not have your health commissioner and you do not have HR be your SME, your subject matter expert that is leading your succession planning sessions.

We were also able to piggyback our succession planning meetings off of an already existing monthly meeting. So we did our PM, our project management and quality improvement meetings, were an hour, once a month, it's, you know, like a Tuesday, the second Tuesday afternoon of the month. So what we did is we just added on another hour. Everybody on our succession planning team was already sitting in a conference room, so we just switch out. I, the person leading the other one leaves, I come in, and now we're going to focus on succession planning for an hour. And I think what's really great about that for us is that it's regular, it sends that message that this is going to be something that is important, and we feel it has value.

It shows that you're really serious about it, and it's not a ton of time out of the day-to-day work. It's an hour a month with maybe a little bit of doing some work outside of that eventually.

And then that very first meeting.

It's gonna be this! It's just gonna be talking about all of this stuff that Joy and I are going to be, teaching you today, especially. You're going to be making that case to all of them, getting your team on board, getting them trained in learning about succession planning. You're going to be teaching and informing them. You're going to be making that case to the team, and then hopefully that's going to trickle down, and then staff will be able to have that buy-in. Staff is not going to value succession planning. They are not gonna buy into it if your management has not bought into it, and if your management does not value it.

You know, we're not… we're not stupid people. We don't hire stupid people, right? So you can pick up pretty quickly if the person leading you doesn't really believe in the work that they're doing. So I go back to reiterating how important it is to get that leadership team on board.

And really get that buy-in and making that case for it.

And also keep in mind, too, that We go back to this same information all the time. So, we've had to refer back many times, especially over that first year, but we're… over 3 years in on this, and there are days I still go back, and I'm saying, well, no, actually, you're talking about replacement planning, and we're talking, you know… So, these are concepts that, you know, they don't always just come, right, overnight.

Systems thinking is tough.

You know, and especially if that systems thinking is something new to you, not everybody, you know, went into their career so they could follow business models, right? Some of us went because we're science-y, or, you know, whatever the case may be. So some of this stuff can be very new and tough to master, and that's okay.

So, as we are thinking about moving forward, some of the things, then, that you're going to want to do, as shown in this slide, this is where we're moving towards. You're going to really want to think about these questions, and have your organizational chart, your retirements for our next sessions, so that we are able to identify those possible successors, and then we can think about how they can be developed.

Again, like I said, only 35% of organizations have a succession plan. That means 65% do not have a succession plan. And 70% of succession planning initiatives fail within 2 years.

And it's because of lack of support from senior leadership.

So, what we are talking about today is absolutely that foundational cornerstone to your success. So, plan on taking some time to get people to understand and buy into the importance of succession planning like I said, this really, really emphasizes how important that… that understanding it is for yourself can be, and you want to make that business case. We started our process to identify potential successors after we ensured that our team understood the alignment of all of our systems. And Joy is going to guide you through that process, which will also help you in terms of making your case for succession planning. So, Joy, I will hand the reins over to you now.

Thank you.

JOY ERMIE:
All right, great. Hi, everyone. I hope you can see me and hear me. There I am. Okay, so we're now gonna… thank you, Tiffany, very, very much. Preparation, like anything else, takes the most time, and that was a lot of information, but we're gonna be together for two more times after this, and I think you'll start to see how it all works together. So we're now moving on to the next phase, which is alignment. So we're going to discuss the role that other plans within your organization play.

The importance of a business case, and we're going to talk a little bit about considerations for a budget.

Alright, here we go.

So, there are 4 key processes that feed into succession planning, and we're going to take them one by one. So, accreditation process, strategic plan, workforce data, and core competencies.

So, for accreditation, we understand that not every health department is accredited or chooses to be. However, in Domain 8, it does focus on the need for health departments to support recruitment, development, and promotion of competent workforce. So, as an accredited health department, we were able to lean on the standards and develop and retain that workforce. So, this is fabulous if you are seeking or you are currently accredited.

If you don't, even if you don't seek accreditation, you'll see the need for succession planning. Like you know, local public health has many specific training areas, that target various populations. So the positions we offer can be very specific, and meet the needs of your residents. So you're going to want to plan to ready your staff and for those further down the pipeline.

Let's talk about your strategic plan. One thing as a health commissioner that I want to remind all of you is we may ask for all these plans, but we actually want to use them. And sometimes I understand, I'm like, I'm human, just like all of you, is things get thrown on us, and we're… and we have all these plans, and they're sitting on the shelf.

The nice part about succession planning, and by following this alignment phase, is you get to take them off the shelf, and you really get in them. And honestly, our strategic plan right now, and we're going to look at it a little bit, you know, the pages are a little wrinkled, we can tell that we're working with them, so that's fantastic.

So, your strategic plan, this is your roadmap for your organization, right? So, within the strategic planning process, you've conducted a SWOT analysis, you've identified anticipated challenges, and I want you right now to think of those challenges, think about the goals of your organization, and ask yourself what talent is needed to address them.

So, as I start showing you some of our examples, I want you to continue to think about that, and then we're gonna… we're gonna ask you.

So, we did ask you, prior to today, to bring your succession plan and a couple of other things, and we're gonna grab those in a moment. But if you want to, you can grab them now and look over yours as we're reviewing this example.

So you can see on the screen that one of our strategic priorities is workforce development. We have objectives and action steps that outline training plans, a compensation plan, an internship program, and the promotion of innovation.

So these naturally align with succession planning. So we made sure to put completing the department succession planning implementation on our strategic plan. Now.

Does your strategic plan have to be on your… excuse me, does your succession plan have to be on your strategic plan? No. However, it really drives home the fact to your community, your board, your staff, that you're dedicated to this work, because we understand how crucial it is to have a competent workforce, and to make sure that we have a plan for succession moving forward.

And we also know how easy competing demands can overshadow administrative work. So, and without a workforce, we can't meet any of our demands, so we wanted to make sure to prioritize this.

I wanted to also add an example of, within our strategic plan that is above and beyond just that workforce. So, community engagement and fiscal viability. Now, you'll see here, and I just took a couple snippets from it.

But if we want to go out and engage our community to make sure that we're doing exactly what we need to do for our target populations and for our county, we didn't introduce Henry County. We have just under 28,000 people. We are rural. We are in the northwest corner of the state of Ohio, right near the border of Indiana and Michigan.

And so, our population, could be very different than the population of maybe a more urban county that's not too far away from us.

So, if we want to investigate how to do community engagement, that's going to take certain skills and talents that not everybody across public health might have, and vice versa.

Looking at fiscal viability, we see over and over and over again with PH wins and the Beaumont Foundation surveys is that finances is one of the lowest ranking skills that people in public health have.

And so, if we focus that as a priority, then we already kind of answer that question as to, you know, what talent do we need to make sure that our goals are met? Another really important thing, is your workforce data, and understanding what your workforce looks like, and how you intend to develop it. So, all that information, the workforce information, is going to feed into your workforce development plan.

And so hopefully you have one of those as well. And within our agency's workforce development plan, our strategies include continued evaluation of the onboarding and training process to ensure that all staff are given the knowledge and the tools needed for their job.

That's the least we can give them, right? This includes position-specific training plans, as well as agency-wide trainings. And by having those position-specific training plans, which is new for us.

They act like a roadmap for that succession planning, which will come in very handy in the next few phases.

So, we're going to start chatting now. So, I want you to grab those strategic plans, maybe revisit your mission, vision, your values, whatever you have there, pending vacancies, think about what's going on in your organization.

And let's look at this first Slido. So, what skills are necessary to ensure your organization's successful performance? So just… throw in… Some of those skills there.

Maybe it's communication, maybe it's presentation skills, that's a great one data analysis.

So, some are certifications or educational backgrounds, absolutely, like nursing.

Or finance, maybe some management, but also that good communicator, that transfer of knowledge, that cooperation and collaboration, emotional IQ, conflict management, training.

Grands! Yeah, kind of need that, don't we? Mentoring, flexibility.

Beautiful.

Multigenerational work areas, beautiful. Transparency. Real transparency.

Technical.

Yeah, performance management, PM, informatics, training, tracking, Right? We're public health.

We're assessment, we're policy writing. We have… we have a lot to do. We have to partner with our organizations. We have to understand what they're doing at our level, local level, state level, fed level, and we have to make sure that we are taking those messages, and we are talking to… we're the boots on the ground, right? We're local health, so being that communicator coming up is number one.

Thinking, finance, leadership knowledge is fantastic.

unbiased.

Ethical considerations. Very important.

Yes, and communication, written and verbal.

True leadership skills, yes. There's… there's a big difference between being a leader and being a boss, right? Love it.

Facilitation skills. We're coalition builders, absolutely.

Okay.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much. So hopefully, if you were wondering, like, what is she talking about? How am I looking at this? There was a question earlier that said, well, you know, what about those people that don't know that they're, you know, aren't going to be picked for succession planning. Well, as you can see.

Succession planning isn't replacement planning. It's not like we're taking this pawn and we're moving it here. It is developing your entire workforce based on this amazing alignment phase, and we're going to keep talking two more sessions about how you're going to do this.

And so, you develop everyone. The worst case scenario in succession planning is you develop everyone to be the best version of themselves in their current position, and then you're going to start seeing people poke out of different areas, and it's really going to help you along the way. Okay.

Let's go to our next one.

So what challenges or weaknesses is your organization facing that succession planning may help to address? funding.

Yeah, we're gonna… We're gonna give you some tools to talk to leadership, to have those conversations. Several retirements, amen.

Brain drain, yes. We're gonna talk about a lot of knowledge management transfer, resources to create the plan. I hear you, and we're gonna talk about that. Just like all of you, we've got about… everybody wears about 4 hats here. So, regardless of how many people are within your organization, you're going to flex this. It's going to be as large or as it's going to be as simple as possible, and we'll try to get some specific examples as we go through these next sessions together employee capacity, Actually, succession planning helps with that significantly.

Time, because you're dealing with the fires, yep, yep, yep.

But the good thing about the fires is that we can… we're gonna see what skills we're developing out of it, and we're gonna see where we're going with that.

Burnout, retirement, decreased funding, day-to-day firefighter, you sometimes just feel like a firefighter.

Lack of clarity.

I know.

Distrust of public health and public health initiatives. But, you know, one of the things that, really increases trust Is that regardless of who's coming in and out of your organization, you are doing the best job, transferring that knowledge to the people surrounding that person that's leaving.

Planning on leaving, or has left, and you are giving that… still that same high-quality work that you always have long-term vacant positions. I know sometimes it's really hard when you're in rural America, to get people arrogance in leaders, I'm not sure if you're talking, health leaders, if you're talking Like, county leaders, but nevertheless, arrogance at any level isn't going to help this.

Over-reliance on external supports, vendor supports, yeah.

DAY:
And just… I just wanted to say, Joy, too, I noticed there was one that mentioned cronyism, and I love that that was mentioned, because that is one of the things succession planning really can help eliminate, because you have a process in place, and so that way, if staff is prone to saying you're playing favorites.

You have a lot of paperwork to support that.

Sorry to jump in, Joy, but I just had to bite on that one.

ERMIE:
No, you're fine. I'm glad. They're growing by so fast, and I can't scroll, so thank you for catching that. Okay, so let's move on to the next one.

Yeah, local government, okay.

Job uncertainty.

You know, for job uncertainty, just think, we're building skills.

And a lot of times, I know that within the last few months, I've had my moments, my tearful moments, where I'm like, oh my goodness, what am I gonna do if public health ceases to exist? Well, first of all, I've got away from my pity party, and I know public health is always going to be here, in one way, shape, or form. But also, too, the skills that we know in public health we can use everywhere, because the last time I checked, us in public health, we do everything, right? Our hands are in so many different avenues, whether it's economics, whether it's housing, whether it's leadership roles. Like, look at those.

Come on, look at those skills that you guys told me. Where will communication, project management, all those things not work? So, we're gonna stay… we're gonna… we're gonna really focus on those skills.

Hoarding of information, yeah.

Yeah, we're gonna de-hoard. Here we go. Okay, so I don't think that's a word. So, how will succession planning benefit your organization? So, think about that.

You get that buy-in, we start doing these things, we start seeing the information sharing, we have key positions that we're going to identify next session, I'm going to teach you how to identify some of your really high potential, high-performing staff. We're going to start seeing in the third one, we're really going to start you know, creating that pipeline. Yeah, right? It's a positive culture shift. It's increased morale, sustainability, trust, inspire growth, business, prepare a more stable team with depth. I say that all the time. I'm like, how deep can we go? Let's get… because anybody can do a job here, but it's those fabulous ones that can dig really deep and know how to truly answer the why behind what they do professionalism. Make work… get those workforce development plans off the shelf and in use. Long-term stability.

Having faith that, when you're filling vacancies, that they are ready to go. Skill building, follow man… follows change management best practices.

Beautiful! Okay.

Surviving trying times. Right there, I am going to tell you this is going to help to do that.

Less stress on staff when vacancies come up. Yep.

Wonderful. Okay.

Well, let's keep on moving.

Okay, so I talked a lot about skills, we talked about that workforce data, we talked about your workforce development plan, and how I'm going to want you to look through there and see what your priorities are. I can't tell you what your priorities are, and then your strategic plan, and what your goals are. Okay, now let's look at core competencies.

So, many of you know that, you may already kind of think, like, hmm, I have some people in mind for succession planning, and who might be the person to fill another position? But I'm gonna say, it's not because of the person themselves as much as it is the skill sets that they carry with them. So we're going to move away from, like, the actual person to the skill sets that they possess, and then if we can share that and grow everyone, you're going to see more and more people in the game. So you, even people who currently don't have those core competencies, you can absolutely develop them.

And looking at them, assessing them, is the best way to do that.

So, you're probably already, familiar with the Council on Linkages Between Academia and Public Health Practice, and if you are, you know that the skills are divided into 8 domains, and into 3 tiers based on the levels of their positions.

And then above and beyond those core competencies. You know, there's also a lot of skills that your organization may deem important, for each position, such as these from Sigma. So, you know, asking yourself and going back to what you entered in that list that we went over, is what skills are necessary to ensure your organization's successful performance. You know, perhaps it's all of those wonderful things that you said. And if that's the case, once you know those skills, and you've identified them for each position, because of course, not everybody has to have the same level of conflict management, not everyone has to have the same level of formal presentation.

You're going to need to find an effective way to regularly assess those skills, and then you're going to provide a formal structure and accountability for implementing a plan to address those skill gaps.

You just don't want to put all those words that we had in the first Slido down and be like, okay, everybody, I want you to go get those skills. You're going to say, hey, for your job, these are the competencies that are important. We're going to assess these on a regular basis, and what better time to do that than maybe your annual evaluations and your performance reviews, and we're going to talk about that, those in session three, and then looking at the Skill gaps, and then having training in place to fill those gaps.

So this work is also going to be helpful if you're hiring from the outside. So we also have to realize that not everyone, not every position, is going to be filled internally.

And in that case, you're not losing any time by looking at these skills, because it's going to help you when you're hiring what exactly you're looking for. You know what to put on your job postings, and it narrows down, when you're reading those resumes, the skill set.

It can also help to guide your internship programs, if you have one.

Nope.

If health commissioners and administrators are on this call, or invited you to be on this call, then that already speaks volumes of their commitment to succession planning efforts.

But maybe you still have some convincing to do, and maybe it's not so much your administrator as it's, you know, somebody else within the organization. And so, the best way for you to have, and I call it elevator pitch, is to develop that justification for succession planning is to develop the business case.

That way, you can get buy-in, and you can have commitment. Now, make sure to remember alignment when you're writing your business case. You don't want to say, I want to have, you know, I want to do succession planning because it's… it'll help with domain aid of accreditation. No, no, no. That's not going to talk anybody into anything. So you want to go back to your strategic plan. You want to go back to that workforce development plan. Can you articulate the link between those strategic goals and succession planning? How about your workforce data in succession planning? And can you describe the benefits? Now, we gave you a lot of cheat sheets in these slides, so hopefully you'll be able to go back and see some of those benefits. And do you have data to support the work? And, you know, you need to have some goals. What are your succession planning goals? So, I'm going to give you an example.

Of a business case.

So, a strategic goal of our health department is workforce development.

Ensuring the Health Department can carry out its mission.

We must take into consideration that we are at risk of losing a great deal of institutional knowledge, as 70% of management and 45% of staff are eligible for retirement within the next 3 to 5 years.

It is vital that we identify potential skill gaps and be able to fill those gaps.

Hiring new employees with experience, education, and knowledge, as well as implementing a program to further develop current staff with the skills, knowledge, and ability to perform those duties are critical for our agency's continued success.

And that's it.

That's it for us.

For you, your percentages might be different, your reasoning might be different, maybe yours focuses more on funding, ours focuses more on institutional knowledge being lost.

Maybe yours will focus more on very specific skill gaps, while ours is just we're looking at them across the board because of the amount of people that are eligible for retirement.

In the next 3 to 5 years.

So, as we get close to ending for today, so we're going to look at some goals of succession planning. We want to promote seamless staff transitions. We know nothing is perfect, but we know that doing nothing is going to make it definitely worse for us.

We want to preserve the legacy of achievements and experiences. You have trust and credibility. Somebody hearted that when Tiffany was talking, or put it in the chat.

We want to preserve that legacy, especially right now more than ever. Your residents see you.

before they see anyone else on TV, in their neighborhoods, right? So we want to make sure that we're preserving that legacy. And we want to focus planning on those critical vulnerabilities. As we start going through this, you are not going to have a succession plan for every single position at all times.

This would be your… you would be working overtime every week, and it would be your time and a half job. We're just going to talk about those real critical vulnerabilities, and then we're going to build pools of talent that are capable for competing for essential positions. Again, we're not saying we're hand-picking, we're also not saying that we're pitting people against each other, we are just, in general.

Making everybody better at their job by looking at the skills necessary for various positions, starting with their own, because everybody could probably improve a little bit on their own position.

And encourage employee engagement, collaboration, and mentorship. That is a goal, and we can absolutely see that.

The last thing is if money is an issue, and funding is, and you have to talk about it, I want to tell you some things when you're determining, the budget and when you're making your case.

Is you really do have to sometimes consider dual salaries.

There will be times, depending on the, The critical nature of certain positions.

that you may have an overlap in salaries, so that's something you need to consider. Today's salaries. If you haven't done a compensation plan in a while, or you're still just doing these old steps from a million years ago, or whatnot, you know, I ask you that you have to look at today's salaries, not only because some of your positions are going to have to be replaced from the outside.

But we need to do the best that we can do for… to retain the people that we have. I think that was somebody at the very beginning said, yes, let's… let's realize how amazing the staff are that we have, and give them that shot and that nod, and not just hire from the outside.

Again, hiring costs. Think about how much money you're going to save.

training costs, in the shifting of duties. What I mean by shifting of duties is, if somebody internally is promoted, is… you're still going to have to replace their position, and that lower position might have a few people who can shift some duties, more of that replacement planning, in the meantime before you're getting somebody else. In a perfect world.

You would kind of know what was happening, and you would have a succession plan for each layer.

But… You know how that goes sometimes. Okay, so what are we doing next? You're going to take a look at that org chart that you have, your pending retirements, your team considerations, who's going to serve on your succession planning team, do you have a really good business case if you need to promote this? Grab that strategic plan and that workforce development plan, and I want you to weave it all together and draft those succession plan goals, because if you don't have a goal, you're never going to reach it. Gosh, I sound like a personal trainer.

So, we want to… we just want to invite you to do all of those things. Now, so today, we did. We offered you a great deal of information to lay the foundation, for your succession planning endeavors.

And, you know, like most worthwhile ventures, that preparation and alignment tend to take the most effort, as you're both learning and teaching other people.

So, rely on the plans that you already have. Rely on the resources that are on the next few slides, rely on our slides, rely on this recording, and please trust us when we say you can really scale this however you need to, and we're going to have some time here, for questions and answers. So, I think I'm going to… I think I'm just gonna stop here. I don't know.

I'm gonna let ASTHO take over from here, I think.

ROTHENBUECHER:
Oh, thank you so much, Tiffany and Joy, how wonderful that was. I couldn't… imagine, I hope you all feel this way, but I just was just, like, giddy talking about succession planning. That doesn't happen very often, and I think it has to do with your presenting skills, so thank you so much.

There were some questions answered, asked and answered already, so thanks, Joy and Tiffany, for doing that.

So you may see some questions and answers as participants already responded to. There is another question that, I just wanted to open up to see if you all have thoughts on. I'm curious about addressing the concern that folks identify other folks who have similar skill sets and personalities as them when identifying the best candidate.

I know that at a prior agency, we had an entire training about how to avoid this happening. Any thoughts on that?

ERMIE:
Tiffany, why don't you take this one? I know what I would say, but…

DAY:
Oh, -oh!

ERMIE:
It was a sneeze.

DAY:
I got a little pop quiz. So my thought, first of all, goes to, well, the usual answer, just wait till the next class, we will be addressing some of this, I think, very directly, so I don't want to get too deep into the weeds on stuff that we're going to cover in a whole session. But I think that, one.

That is one of the reasons why I stress that whoever's your subject matter expert and is leading your succession planning team isn't a part of management and is not a part of HR, because again, you don't have, in my role that I'm in right now, I'm not a part of those kind of managerial types of conversations. I'm not seeing people's personnel files.

So this makes it a lot easier for me to sit back then and be very objective and look at facts and ask questions that way.

I also think that by having this in place, you are having a way that is, Objective and not subjective in terms of why you are choosing the people to train up as the way that you are.

There's also, which we will… we'll talk about, but I'll throw it in right now.

part of that process includes actually going to staff and looking at interest of what staff has. So, ultimately.

By doing the succession plan, you're really kind of laying those pieces in place.

in terms of that exact question, in terms of somebody's, like, essentially playing favorites or picking people that are just like them, I think this makes it a little more challenging to do something subjectively like that.

ERMIE:
If… fantastic. It really goes down to… it really just goes down to, in the next session, we're going to talk about creating your talent pool, and how your talent pool is not created by the management alone, and it's not created by the staff alone, and so we're going to talk about how those that… those come together, like a VIN diagram. And then, you're… you're really not pitting anybody against anybody else or saying, I'm picking this person.

You're really just saying, in succession planning, we're just trying to have the best continuity for our organization, and so everybody's just going to get trained up which I believe, as I say, continuity. The next question says, any recommendations for how emergency preparedness and response teams can work closely with workforce development specialists to encourage this without seeming pushy, coming off like we're up in their business? Epr teams are concerned with regard to identification of staff for COOP, but don't see the EPR team… oh, yeah, no. Okay. So, when we think about COOP, we're in an emergency.

This is… this is not that. Succession planning is slow and steady.

It is a process. While COOP is… poop hit the fan.

I gotta go into COOP, I need to know my essential functions, and I need to get… you go here, you go here, I'm the incident commander, no longer are you reporting to this person, and we're just kind of… like, remember, I know we all remember March of 2020, where you're just kind of all coming together, and you might be doing other things.

Now, can succession planning help Coop? Absolutely, because in the long run, as you increase everybody's skill level, especially the agency-wide core competencies.

Everybody's working at a higher level, everybody's feeling more important because they're more invested, because you're more invested in them, you're sending them to trainings, you're giving them opportunities to lead trainings, and then you can go for… you can go from there. But I hope I answered your question to kind of divide out that COOP is emergency, and this is not.

And feel free to keep adding to it if I missed.

DAY:
And I know I had a slide where it did mention COOP, and I actually accidentally missed saying my little piece on that, and the reason why it is there, it says in the slide that it works in conjunction with the coupe, and Ultimately, that's because both ensure that the agency can keep operating, and also you can… utilize your COOP as a resource when you're thinking about what are the vital functions of my office as we start thinking about what are the key positions, what are my mission-critical positions, for the succession plan. And like we said, those can often vary. There are a lot of factors to that, but sometimes that COOP can be a really good springboard, especially if you're like, I'm not even sure where I should start with this. It gives you a nice idea of just going back to basics and saying, alright, but what has to be done, always?

ERMIE:
We're reading your lips, A.C.

ROTHENBUECHER:
Thanks, Joy. I was just gonna say, thank you for those who were also contributing to what Tiffany and Joy had to say in responses. Like, we can all learn from each other, so thank you.

For offering your contributions also in the chat.

Succession Planning Part 2 of 3: Laying the Groundwork

This second session provides a step-by-step overview of the stages of succession planning. Learn how to incorporate staff survey data into planning efforts and explore knowledge management as a critical strategy for retaining institutional knowledge and supporting staff transitions.

Speakers

Joy Ermie, Health Commissioner, Henry County Health Department
Tiffany Day, Public Health Specialist, Henry County Health Department

Resource

Succession Planning Part 2 of 3: Presentation Slides (PDF)

A.C. ROTHENBUECHER:
Welcome, good morning, good afternoon.

Whatever your time zone is, we're excited that you're here.

Alright, it's top of the hour. We are going to get started with our ASTHO Connect series, so…

Welcome to all of you!

For those of you who are… coming from our first session, welcome back, we're excited you came back. For those of you who are coming in brand new, we're also super excited that you're here to join us for Session 2 of Succession Planning for Public Health Agencies, a three-part ASTHO Connect series. Hosted and led by our lovely presenters, Tiffany and Joy, from Henry County Health Department.

If you wouldn't mind, in the chat, feel free to put your name and your jurisdiction in the chat as we get started, so we can get a sense of who's here. I'm AC Rothenbucher, Director of Workforce at ASTHO, and I'll be welcoming in our presenters.

So, from Session 1, if you were able to participate, or you've been able to watch the previous session, just a grounding of what we talked about. So, we were really talking about the foundational concepts of succession planning, including what it is and what it is not.

In that session, our presenters, talked about how succession planning aligns with agency goals, workforce development strategies, and other system-wide drivers. They also touched on key roles and responsibilities of a strong succession planning team.

So now we're moving into Session 2, laying the groundwork.

They'll continue to walk through the stages of succession planning, and they'll also start to talk through how to incorporate staff survey data into planning efforts, and explore knowledge management as a critical strategy for retaining institutional knowledge and supporting staff transitions.

A few housekeeping things before we get started. There are options at the bottom of your Zoom screen for chat, and I see lots of folks putting things in the chat. React buttons, if you want to do a heart or a… thumbs up, I'm also seeing some of those happen already, as well as Q&A function. And please feel free to submit questions throughout the presentations, and we will be monitoring the Q&A and responding, as well as there will be time at the end of presentation for questions. You may even have questions that you've thought about from Session 1.

That you may want to put into the Q&A, so feel free to do that.

And also, my last thing is that throughout, in the chat function, you'll start to see some, links and, thrown out by our ASTHO team. There will be some handouts provided for this session that you can use in your own agency.

There will also be a link to the registration for Session 3, as well as a link to the landing page for where you can find all the resources from this series.

And with that, I will turn it over to Joy and Tiffany.

JOY ERMIE:
All right. Well, hi, everyone! It's great to be back, and thank you for that amazing introduction, AC. I am going to see if I can move these slides. Okay, here we are.

Well, I'm not going to reiterate too much of what AC said, but I just want to look, remind you of our series learning objectives. This is a three-part series. You can view the first one. Again, I see that it is in the chat link, if you missed it, and then today is number two, and then in a couple weeks, we'll see you again. So we're going to distinguish that succession planning, as AC said, from others. We're going to identify those key roles, and we're going to talk about aligning, like we talked about a little bit last time.

And then for today, we're going to describe the key stages of succession planning once more, explain how to incorporate, like she said, that staff data, and we're going to talk a little bit about knowledge management.

So, real quick, if you remember, these are the six phases of succession planning. We did talk about preparation last time and alignment last time, and AC did such a great job, I'm not even going to repeat it. So today we are going to be diving right into the analysis part, so I am going to hand it over to Tiffany, and then I'll talk to y'all in just a few.

TIFFANY DAY:
All right, thank you! Thanks for the refresher from both of you. And we are now moving into Phase 3, our third phase, which is analysis.

In this phase, we are going to identify key positions which, are oftentimes also called critical roles.

And when we say that, we're talking about key positions or critical roles that are for succession planning.

We're going to look at the competencies that are important for our health department, and what we're really going to get into assessing that talent pool. And by talent pool, we're talking about those high-performing, high-potential employees who have a desire to learn and grow with your organization.

And we're gonna also create or establish that pipeline. And that pipeline is sort of that, that little, you know, our little row of potential future leaders, for your potential or pending vacancies that might be coming up.

And we want to assess knowledge management. We want to make sure that nothing is lost when someone leaves.

So this is the phase where we're going to identify our potential successors, but we also have to determine which positions have the highest potential need, or are the most vulnerable.

One thing that we realized, but really not until we were months into the process, was we had a little bit of confusion with our team in the difference between the talent pool and the key positions.

So, to be clear, we are doing two separate things here. We're talking about two different things. One.

We're going to determine our talent pool, which is going to create that pipeline of potential successors. And when we're talking about that, that's when we're really talking about the people in our organization.

On the other hand, our second, sort of separate thing that we're doing is we're going to be identifying key positions. And when we are talking about the key positions, we're really looking more at the work, the duties, the job itself, and factors that play into that.

Joy's going to tell you more about the talent pool in a few minutes, but first I really want to take a look at determining your key positions, and so that's where we'll start right now.

So, how do you determine these key positions? To be clear, again, these are going to be your key positions or critical positions in terms of succession planning. So, when we're talking about key positions, I don't necessarily mean that these jobs, these roles are more important than any others.

Or that the other positions are not valued.

That's not really the case at all. But, we are going to be considering several factors when we're selecting our key positions, many of which are listed on this slide. Remember, these factors will not be the same for every health department.

They're not going to be the same at your health department, necessarily, year by year, as you update plans or review.

And they can even be very different from division or internal departments as you break them out when compared to each other. So you really have to kind of look at where… what are those circumstances? Where are you right now in the moment for that focus?

And then we will focus on those positions, again, here. So we're not really thinking about, necessarily, employees or names, we're really thinking more about those roles and the factors that play into them.

And it can… it can be a little overlapping, but I'll point that out when we get into it a little bit more.

Okay, so we had asked, I believe, prior to the first course, that you are familiar and have, access to your org chart. So, when we think about an org chart, we are fortunate, being a smaller health department, in that ours is fairly simple.

We have… I mean, obviously we have our board, but we have our health commissioner, or your director, whatever terminology you have for your leader, your ultimate leader, right? Then we… and that is our blue on this particular slide. Then we have, management. So that's the green on our slides here. And our management is broken into each division or department, so each one has its own, and then their direct reports, or the staff that makes up that department.

Some of you may have some middle management in there between the green and the red layers, and that's going to make things look a little bit differently for you. So as you think through this, you want to consider that you make sure your succession planning team, as you move forward, is very familiar with the duties and the staff.

So if you do have some middle management there, you want to make sure that if your green, your upper management, don't necessarily know the ins and outs of the roles and the duties, if they don't necessarily know all of the details on staff need, performance, then you're going to want to make sure that you're involving some middle management, and that might reflect in the makeup of your team, or perhaps you invite them in to occasional meetings of the team, but maybe not every meeting.

So again, keep that in mind, too, as we work through this.

So, moving on, and I believe that you should have a handout that is two pages, for this one.

Typically, as you start thinking about the critical positions, you're probably going to start with upper management or leadership. So, maybe some… also, you might want to be considering some of the administrative-type roles. Those would be some of those roles that are really key to operations, right? And you're probably going to want to really think about some of the linchpin, we could call them linchpin roles.

So, let's say if you have your own IT, for example, that might be something that is considered a linchpin role because it requires very specific skills.

The jobs whose vacancies would cause the greatest disruptions or challenges to operations are the jobs that you want to have on the front burner for succession planning.

You can also take into consideration your COOP plan for continuous operations.

But I don't want you to get too caught up in… the difference between mission critical and essential functions, because we found, too, that we had, some of that happening, internally with our succession planning team.

While a job may be essential, it may have essential functions that, regardless of what happens within the world, and, you know, like during the pandemic, they still needed to continue with some of those essential functions. When we think about mission critical, essential functions can be a nice springboard or starting place, but when we think about being mission critical.

We really want to think about what needs to be done currently, we want to remember that every department or division within your organization is going to have some mission-critical roles, or a mission-critical role.

So that that department can function, even if that department is not considered an essential function in the world of public health. So I hope that clarification makes some sense.

We're looking at… we're wanting to identify what are going to be some of those positions that are going to most impact the performance of your organization, or the success of your organization. So you're really going to want to consider leadership, you're going to want to consider responsibilities, strategic importance, and again, specialized skills.

So, if you look at this handout, and I'm going to take a little bit of time to go through it with you, and I don't want to try to do it where I'm just reading everything to you, but we have found that making sure we have an understanding of these key position categories is pretty essential to this step in the process.

So using this handout as a guide, you can start to identify the roles to target in succession planning.

So as… as we look at those rolls… oh, I guess I left mine for a little bit bigger of a font, over here. There we go. So, I have these in, a particular order that will match up with some of the other slides coming.

So, the first category that is listed is single incumbent or stand-alone position.

So, this is the type of job where maybe you only have one person in your health department who does this, or it's very, very small in comparison to the numbers of other positions that you have you're going to want to think about what are the unique duties that they do, and can anybody else do them? I think a great example of this would be an epi. An epidemiologist really has some very unique requirements and duties that they perform, and even somebody, you know, with, education specific to public health.

Might not have those particular skill sets.

Next is key tasks. So that's really thinking about, do they perform critical tasks that, if they were not there, if this position no longer existed, if this were vacated for a period of time, would those functions hinder… would those, excuse me, would those tasks missing hinder vital functions for your organization? Specialized or unique skill sets? Well, that IT example would be a good one. These are the kind of things that you get over years and years of doing the job, or maybe they have certain certifications, or other types of licensure that is required. Do other people have those skill sets? Can your agency get people with those skill sets, or do they need to provide those skill sets to someone else?

How difficult to replace is this position? So, sometimes we have jobs where the agency just has a hard time finding candidates. Immediately to my mind comes, environmental health specialists.

We have found, historically, that we struggle to find qualified candidates for those types of positions. And again, even a master's in public health may not make you qualified to be an environmental health specialist, so it can be much harder to find people to fill those positions.

Geographic challenges. Well, we live in a world where people love to work remotely, but how important is it that this position be held by somebody who is local to you or can it be carried out? Like, potentially an epidemiologist? They don't necessarily have to be right there in your office, or living in the same community as you do to do the functions of their job.

So that would be a bit of a difference, whereas, you know, somebody doing vital stats is probably going to have to be right there to be with the, community members when they come into the building requesting that.

Are they difficult to retain, or is there a risk of attrition? Now, this is combined here, but you're really kind of looking at two separate things. So, are they diff… are they difficult to retain? Listen, we all know that there are some positions that are considered sort of stepping stone jobs, or maybe you know there's a very high turnover rate because people come in, people come out.

Is it hard to keep people to stay in those jobs? Likewise, is there a risk of attrition? So by attrition, what we mean is will that job, if that job becomes vacant, are you gonna scratch it? Is there a potential to eliminate that position? And then thinking about, as well, you may have some unique positions that are sort of a mishmash of, of different duties. For example, internally at our health department currently, we have our preparedness coordinator is also learning to be a PIO. That doesn't mean that always has to stay that way so that everybody who takes that particular job is going to do those two things. As a matter of fact, we had some people that, vacated a position, and so we chose, and again, this is where you're going to really want to know that org chart.

You can, you know, pull duties and move them into some other positions.

So, is that possible? And that is where… what we're talking about when we're thinking about difficult to retain, risk of attrition, can you eliminate the position, can you carve up some of those duties or functions and move them somewhere else? These are all possibilities to consider when you're doing succession planning.

And then, going into that second side of this handout, are they retirement vulnerable? Now, I think a lot of times, this is the one that actually can move you to the front burner quite quickly. You want to really think about who's retirement vulnerable in the next 5 to 6 years? And this is going to require you or your, management, whoever's the, you know, looking at their direct reports. You are going to need to have those conversations and find out from the individual holding the position if they can qualify in the next 5 to 6 years.

What are their thoughts? What are they thinking? Where are they at in that process? You may have one person that's 5 years out saying.

I cannot wait, I have the countdown going already, and another person, maybe 5 years out, and say, I can see myself being here another 10.

So you want to make sure that you're keeping your eye on that prize, on if they're at 5 to 6 years, that is a consideration. You can give some more weight to this idea of knowing, I'm pretty confident that they are going to go into retirement when they can, or on this time frame. And then if they're even sooner than that, so if you're talking less than 5 years, especially 1 to 3, but even if you're getting into that 3 to 5, that's going to be even more of, you know, a reason to really take into consideration as well.

The next two, we have executive senior leadership positions. We also have administrative leadership positions. So, we're talking about things that are really high level. Your director of finance, maybe your director of nursing, your health commissioner. Those are going to be positions that are absolutely mission critical, and if those were to be vacated tomorrow, they are not necessarily going to be easily replaceable. Likewise, sometimes we don't always think about administrative positions, but what happened if you lost your HR? Or maybe you have a high-level account clerk that, without them, you're nothing, type of a thing. So really think about those positions as well. And then, of course, we're talking about mission-essential functions, and those would be those positions that require very specific or technical professional expertise.

And so, again, nobody… not everybody under the sun can be a public health nurse. I have a master's in public health.

But I have no nursing license, so I could never be considered for a position like that. Sometimes specialists, maybe grant management might be another type of position where you would give some strong consideration to, oh gosh, if I lost that person in that… holding that position right now, that's going to leave us in a little bit of a pickle.

So, that gets us an idea of how we are going to start thinking about this now…

DAY:
Typically, as you start going through these, thinking about your critical positions, you're going to want to really start, doing this for each department.

So, you're going to want to have those supervisors, those management, those division leaders. They're going to want to think about all of their direct reports. They're going to want to really know those positions, the skills required, what's happening within their department. You're going to want to have them consider these categories and ask those types of questions that we just reviewed.

I don't want you to overthink this.

Don't try to pre-plan it. You just want to kind of go through and very quickly say, you know, is this a retirement vulnerable position. Does this require, certain level of mission-critical knowledge? Just answer the questions and review them. Now, initially we did this where I just had… I gave people a blank sheet of paper with those kind of categories listed at the top, had them do hash marks, had the positions that they had, and the number of them, because you could have, 4 nurses, 4 PHN1s, or four PHN2s, and the… where they all answer on these may be very different. So, that's gonna be your, kind of, the only area where I think you consider a little the employee is gonna be, you know, you do have to consider that in terms of, are they retirement vulnerable? And then also thinking if some of the duties… you may have 4 PHN2s, and the duties might not necessarily all be exactly the same, even if they're at the same level.

So, again, you're gonna have to kind of think about that as you think about your direct reports.

But we just did, the first time through, kept it super, super simple, did little hash marks.

You know, kind of step back, look at where those hash marks are, and how many are there, and then start thinking about, are these… are these the positions we want to look at for succession planning?

So we actually did this in a succession planning meeting, and everybody sort of went through, did their own independently, but in the room together. Then, we came back and we went through Person by person, or department by department, and had them review their, questions here for the key positions, and had a discussion.

It's important that this is completed as a group activity, that, you don't want to just have somebody doing this, you know, sort of in a vacuum or in a bubble by themselves. Everybody should be… of your team should be reviewing this, because again, it's super important with succession planning that we keep things as objective as possible.

So, having said all that, we have provided this same Excel spreadsheet example for you.

So, what's really nice about this is you can just go in and delete out what I have in there, put in your own positions, and go through and utilize this if that's something you so desire.

I'm looking at here, what we have is an example of the Environmental Health Department.

Some of it is… accurate to our health department? Yes, we have these same four positions. Are the details in the way I answered this exactly the same? Not necessarily. So don't get too caught up in that either. But in this particular example, we have four positions in environmental health. We have a director, we have a registered, environmental health specialist, too, we have an environmental health specialist in training.

Looking to become a 1.

And we have an environmental health technician.

Now, as we go through these categories, we're gonna answer those questions, and like I said before, we just did a hash mark if it was a yes. This one's a little… a little more detailed, and I also did some of that color coding, because I am a visual person, and that helps it stand out to me. If that doesn't float your boat, by all means, you can adapt this how you like.

Are we talking a single incumbent or stand-alone position? Well, in terms of the director and the sanitarians used to be sanitarians, health specialists, health specialists. Those… I say are yes, those are very, standalone. Other people can't necessarily do those. Now, the environmental health technician? Somebody else could probably do that.

So, I would say that is not a standalone or a single incumbent position. Do they do a key task? Well, again, the director and the, environmental health specialists all do, tasks that require that licensure, that, certification, and they also are mission critical. They also are… those are essential functions. So, I would answer those all three as yeses. The environmental health technician? No. Those are not necessarily key tasks.

And again, the skill set, special, unique skills, looking through that department, the director, yes. There are things that the director does that those health specialists, the environmental health specialists, do not do, and the technician does not do. So I went with a yes on just the director.

Are they difficult to replace? Well, again, I used in my prior example that environmental health specialists, historically for us, have been terribly difficult to replace.

When we have gone out, we have very few people that apply for the position, and then going through the ones that do apply, do they have the qualifications can they even meet that? So, definitely, I would say those environmental health specialists are both yeses.

My technician? No, I don't think that one would be too terribly difficult to replace.

And again, we're not talking about the people. The person holding that position is phenomenal. I'm talking about the position itself, the skills, the duties, the requirements to hold that position. Not too difficult to replace.

I can probably… we would probably have candidates that qualified that can do that, both internally and externally, without probably too much concern. Going back up to the Director of Environmental Health, though, is that difficult to replace? Potentially. We could probably have that… the environmental health specialist, too. Might potentially be a consideration for that. At this point, at this stage in succession planning, we don't necessarily know that.

So, would anybody else in the health department be qualified for that position? No. And what about going outside for that position? That might be pretty difficult to replace. So, it's possible. I call that a possible, and I left it as that.

Geographic challenges, I say yes on all of that. You have to be in the office, you have to be in the town, you have to be able to physically go out to sites, you have to be able to do inspections. If issues come up, you may be needed to see something. So, all four of those positions are, yes, for geographic challenges.

Are they difficult to retain? Now, this is interesting, and I like this because it shows the difference.

Are they difficult to replace? Yes. Doesn't necessarily mean that difficult to retain is going to be an issue. Because we have found, historically for us, the director and the environmental health specialist, too.

Those positions have stayed filled for a very, very long time, years upon years upon years. However, having an environmental health specialist in training or an environmental health specialist, one has it has been more difficult to retain, because we have found that people in those… that position often can move around and take other positions, be it internally or externally.

And the environmental health technician, this is a newer position for us, but thus far, retaining an employee in that position has not been a challenge.

So you can see how difficult to retain may be and look very different in different health departments, as well as in different departments within your health department, right? Depending on the job.

Risk of attrition? Well, we would say that probably not many of these positions have a risk of attrition, because we can't eliminate very many of them, because they are essential functions. However, we don't… maybe we don't necessarily have to have registered environmental health specialist 2, here with us.

Because perhaps those duties could be executed by a director, or by an environmental health specialist in training, or… or one.

So, that might be a possibility. Retirement vulnerable, now again, this is where we're going to be looking right at that specific person, and yes, we know that the director of and that environmental health specialist, too, are both able to, retire within 5 to 6 years or less.

The other two positions are not retirement vulnerable.

Are they mission essential? Again, kind of going back, and for us, in this particular example, I feel like those are really matching up a little bit to those special skills and kind of in that geographic challenges, but yes, they are mission essential. We know that our director is a part of senior leadership.

And then we're gonna take a look at what we have and determine, is this a key position for succession planning? As I review through all of these, to me, in my mind, the Director of Environmental Health is a position that we want to eyeball, that we are going to consider as a key position for this succession plan right now.

So, what is interesting, then, is now I've gone through it, now I'm… I will have explained it, just sort of like I did to the team, and the team members may have some questions and say, well why not this? Or why not that? Or, are you really sure that that technician, you know, man, I can't imagine trying to do the job in this department without a technician. Are you sure that's not a key position? And then you can have those types of conversations.

But ultimately, as you first go through this, I just don't get yourself caught up in weighing yes or no's. I went straight with, yes, you could make an argument this way or that way, but in my mind, no, yes, no, yes, for whatever that question may be.

So hopefully this clears some of this up for you just a little bit in terms of pinpointing those key positions.

So, again.

We're going to consider all of these factors for the position, looking at the position. Remember, there's no right or wrong answers to this.

And it also, I think, having talked through this, really illustrates why it's important to have that group review afterwards.

And I want you to keep in mind as well that direct managers alone should not decide this.

It tends to be that direct managers alone will make a focus much more in that hierarchical approach, and that's not always necessarily the case, both in terms of deciding your key positions and deciding your talent pool, which Joy will cover in a little bit here. Again, we need… we really do want to ultimately have some kind of, team effort, team approach to this.

So then we want to touch on… I'm going to touch briefly on knowledge management right now.

And, again, key positions are those positions that are urgent, impactful, specialized. And for this pilot, or your first time through, we are going to look for that greatest need.

All roles, just to reiterate, all roles are inherently essential at your health department, or they won't exist. They exist for a reason. They serve a purpose, right? And over time, you may eventually add every position into your plan. But we are really paring this down. I want to really zoom that camera in, right? And focus in and keep it very simple as we start the process.

Smaller organizations are probably going to have smaller lists, and regardless, it's important to start small and expand over time. That's going to increase your chances for success, and to learn, and to build buy-in and momentum with your team and all of your employees. Once the key positions are determined, everybody that's currently holding those positions are going to be given knowledge management questionnaires. We've provided you with our current general questions for a knowledge management questionnaire, because the thing is.

You don't want to lose all that information when an employee leaves. So, in that example, in the Environmental Health Department, we would be giving that Director of Environmental Health a knowledge management questionnaire to complete.

And the kinds of things that you want, why? For this knowledge management, you're looking at important partners, skills and behaviors, you want to make sure SOGs, SOPs, those standard operating procedures are being tracked.

You want to know those policies and procedures, make sure that they all exist that are needed, that they are updated if they're needed. And you know what? Those questions can also be useful for replacement planning as well. So, you know, you're kind of hitting a few things out of the park with that, because you know, you can utilize those when you do some cross-training if needed as well.

I mean, really? You might even have noticed this, essentially what we're doing is a gap analysis, right? What are… where are the gaps in our staffing? Okay, so, now we want to start thinking about the talent pool. So, if you remember back to that beginning slide, we've looked at the duties, we've looked at the positions, right? We've picked out key positions. Now we want to start looking at our staff. We want to start thinking about who's going to be in our talent pool? What staff do we have that we can start looking at to potentially train up? And potentially be ready to take some of those key positions as they become vacant.

So, we have 3 areas that we want to look at. We want to look at engagement, aspiration, and ability. So, with ability, we are talking about competencies, mastery, soft skills, technical skills. This should all be something that can be very objective, because it should be tracked in the review process.

It should be in the personnel file in terms of certifications.

Accomplishments, all of those sorts of things, right? Engagement. We want staff members that have a commitment to the agency, a commitment to the mission, who are, involved with their work, to a great degree.

And then we want aspiration. We don't just want to pick people willy-nilly or who we think might be really good at this. We also want to make sure that the staff that we are putting in the talent pool have a desire to be in the talent pool, that they want to learn and grow with the agency, and we want the staff to self-report that.

We want to know if they have that motivation to be a part of this, and that's going to be that sweet spot. Those potential successors need all three, so that sweet spot in that VIN diagram, that's where we're going to have our high potential, high-performing, HPHP, we call them, staff members. They're gonna fall right there.

And so, how do we find out if they have any of this interest. Well, we're gonna ask them, and we did that by doing a staff survey, and I believe this is our initial staff survey that we have up here on the slide, but I believe that as part of the handouts that we're giving you, we also gave you our second version of the staff survey as well.

Which also, brings in those core competencies.

So, our team created these questions, we put them in SurveyMonkey so that, you know, they weren't being seen or anything by anybody else, but staff could sit and independently answer that. However, you do have to know who the staff member is, so it can't be entirely anonymous, right? I'm not going to be able to go back and say, oh, hey, I love what you said if I don't know who said it. But you can adapt these however you like.

We utilize this feedback to guide a lot of our staff training, actually, so even if we had people that didn't end up being in what we call our talent pool, that's okay, because we've now learned what some of their interests are. You may have the world's greatest nurse who wants to be a public health nurse two for the rest of her career, and that's fantastic, but I don't want to lose her if she's a great nurse, and she wants to stay here, and I can go with somebody else, you know, he may want to say, yes, I hope someday I'm going to be the Don, and I'll put that person into the talent pool. And in addition to this, I, who was my subject… I'm the subject matter expert, so we talked last time about making sure you've got… you have a subject matter expert guiding this process. So, the subject matter expert met with staff. I went to various, department team meetings, and I explained the process, and the purpose of the survey, and the process and the purpose of succession planning.

Because, let me tell you, it is super, super, super important that you do not do succession planning in a vacuum. You want to be transparent, because otherwise, that's where you're going to start getting a little bit of the, I call it the bip-bip-bipping going on, and you don't want any sort of second questioning, you don't want to have a potential for staff to feel that somehow their position or their duties are threatened. You want it to be very outright of what you're doing and the reasons for doing it.

And I also want you to remember, too, that you may already think that you know. I know that that let's say you think, oh, going back to my example, right, on the spreadsheet in environmental health, maybe you're thinking to yourself, that registered environmental health specialist who has been here with us for 22 years, and he has never wanted to do anything else, he's gonna retire out as this.

But you don't necessarily know that.

So that's why it's really important that you do this staff survey. And the flip-flop can happen as well. You may have somebody that you're thinking.

100%, Bobby Sue is gonna be my next Director of Environmental Health, and then you ask a question, and you find out, Bobby Sue said she has absolutely no interest in switching positions. What a shock.

So make sure you survey everybody, and you can also think, too, if they don't complete the survey, that in and of itself goes back to your engagement, your motivation. So that's a consideration to think about as well, as opposed to saying, how many times am I going to be asking somebody to complete this survey? The results of this survey can help guide you in formulating your talent pool.

And then, just one more a little bit, and then I'm going to turn things over. I have some questions here for you that you can consider as you're thinking about, do they have the ability, aspiration, and engagement, and do they meet that point in the VIN diagram, as well as some other, we have some… some steps, some exercises that Joy will talk about.

All directors or team members can answer these questions to really start getting them thinking, the questions that are on the slide. And then we're going to dig a little bit deeper and do this 9-box assessment matrix, which is a fundamental top-tier, standard procedure in the process of succession planning, and Joy's gonna show you all about that.

But I want you to remember, you… any of these answers that you have for any of these questions, you should be able to support them from the performance reviews, the personnel files, certifications. You need to be objective, not subjective.

And also, please keep in mind that these steps that we're talking about today are probably going to take months multiple, at least one or two meetings, if not more. And I'm talking about the key positions, going through, then, the process of the staff surveys, getting that knowledge management, captured and returned back to you. And assessing that talent pool.

And again, when you do this 9 box that Joy's gonna show you.

it should pretty much match up with what you're coming up with, just sort of off the cuff, thinking through these questions that we have here. So, Joy, I am going to turn this over to you, and we'll go from there.

ERMIE:
All right, thank you so much, Tiffany. So, in addition to gathering the information from your staff.

And ensuring that the staff that you wish to invest in is also interested, is important, and so we want to spend some time analyzing their potential and their readiness. Now, this is a tool that you can use.

And we're gonna play with it a little bit today, so it's gonna be a little interactive.

We call this the potential matrix. Some people call it the Ninebox. It's a talent management tool, and it simply assesses staff on their performance and potential for future growth and development.

Now, it is not an exact science, and some managers did have a little bit of a difficult time with this, taking it too literally, but with practice and a combination of objectivity and subjectivity, we were able to use it as one of our mini tools. And that's why it goes back to that team approach is really important.

So, remember, succession planning overall is not a perfect science. People change people's ideas of what they want to do can change. Your priorities within your health department could change. So, we want to make sure that you understand that sometimes the best laid plans just aren't going to work. But this gives you a head start like you've never had before.

Okay.

Before we go into this nine box, I want to remind you all is that this… the performance and the potential of your employees should be evaluated often. This is not something that your staff members who've been on… been with you for 5 or more years, this is the first time you're ever talking to them about their potential.

We truly, truly have embraced and believe that evaluations or annual performance reviews, whatever you choose to call them, that is a gift that you are giving your staff member to allow them to know exactly where they are, and we're going to talk more about how that and core competencies and all that work together with me next session. So, for right now, let's take a look at this tool and see what we've learned, and we can pass on our best practices. Again, within the chat, a lot of these handouts have been dropped in, so you'll have this for yourself, but right now, we'll see what we can do on the screen.

So, when we're looking on the y-axis, and as we're moving up, I want you to just focus on those, little squares on the outside with the arrows. So, it says that first bottom row has trouble keeping up, not meeting expectations.

The second is consistently meets expectations and may exceed a few. And then the top is always meets and mostly exceeds expectations.

So, we're not looking… do not pay any attention to what's inside the nine box right now. We're just looking at the descriptions. Now, the description of that first column, as we go across, is specialized expert talent and or may have reached career potential.

The second is could be promoted, one or more levels in career, or a lateral move with greater scope and challenge. And then your last column to the right is demonstrated high potential to advance further, perhaps 1 to 2 levels, and three to five years.

So, we're gonna plot.

You are… I'm gonna tell you a story about an employee.

And together, we are going to plot that person on this nine box. So you're going to look at 1, 2, and 3 going up, which is that… those 3 arrows I just read, and you're going to look at the 3 going across, and we're going to pretend we're in middle school social studies, learning map skills, and we're going to come together, and we're going to see where we are.

Okay.

So, Robert. Robert has been with the agency for 6 years. He has great attendance, he came with a master's degree, and he's engaged in his work.

He often finishes projects before the due date and invested in the agency.

He can easily explain his work to others, he's eager to teach others and learn from them. He often volunteers for QI projects, and he sometimes even leads them.

He sees how the dots are connected to public health… within public health and within the agency.

His annual performance evaluations are always full of compliments, and he reaches each goal set for him.

So now, when looking at this potential matrix.

I'd like to know where you would place him.

So I'm going to give you a few minutes, and we're gonna pull up a Slido.

And I'm going to also give you a minute to get that Slido set up. So, Leslie, I think, is going to show us that.

Okay, so if you have your phone, you can log in with that QR code, or join in at slido.com and enter that number.

If that's not gonna work for you, you are more than welcome to put 1 through 9 where Robert falls on your matrix. Okay.

Yep, keep voting, okay? Now, one of the great reasons why we do this as a team, and we talk about it together, is because I'm gonna tell you that I did not choose 9, when… if I were to plot them, so this is where the opportunity for that conversation comes in with your group.

Because not everybody can know everything about every employee. So, let's… I'm gonna see, and hopefully, Leslie, I'm not gonna… mix this up too, too much, but I'm gonna try to move my slides, and if I can't, I'll just come back.

I'm gonna come back to these, but I want to look here. Okay.

So, when we talked about Robert, we talked, and we had to pick one of those three. Remember, and I agree with you, like, he should be at the top, right? He's, he's meeting, he's exceeding, he's doing great. But as he went across, the middle one is he's kind of ready now, and the third one was he'll be ready in about 3 to 5 years.

So, just from my… close relationship with this fictional character of Robert, I think he's ready now. So that's why I plotted him as a 7, which, when we go back, you'll see.

And why many of you maybe plotted him as a 9 is because maybe, you don't see that there's any opportunity in the next 3 to 5 years, or maybe you still think that, there's a lot of, things that he needs to learn, or whatever. So, I think it's… really important that that's why we talk about this, okay? Alright, next.

We are going to talk about… we're going to get another chance to work together. We're going to talk about Mindy. Mindy is fresh out of school. She's energetic, she's dedicated, she's eager to learn, she loves volunteering for stretch assignments.

And under supervision, and with appropriate training, she's always demonstrated great results. She's been with the department for 6 months.

She's already expressing desire to grow, though. Where would you put her on the matrix? So, if we can go to the next Slido, Leslie? Awesome. Again, think about it. Remember, going across the bottom is the first, is specialized where she is. The second is, you know, so there's no more room for growth. So that potential in the first column is she's at as much potential as she's ever going to have.

The second is, probably can move a level or so up, and then… the third column is… can move 1 to 2 and maybe 3 to 5 years, but needs a lot more training. And then remember, going up that Y-axis, the first one is not… not meeting expectations as you would like to see. The middle is mostly exceeding some, and the last is, pretty… pretty… pretty fantastic.

So there's a question about where it's printed. Yes, absolutely. It is in the chat.

So that was… those have been dropped in the chat a few times by our friends at ASTHO.

It is at 2.12. If you were on the call then, there was one that came over called Matrix Descriptions.

So hopefully, I can't… I don't want to click on that for the person who asked in case I lose my spot.

But I agree. So let's go back.

Okay.

So, Mindy has been there for 6 months we don't know if she… she can't possibly be the expert in her field after 6 months, right? We could probably agree with that. And then we go here, and we said, well, she could be promoted one or two levels in career or lateral move with greater scope or challenge.

And the second one is, she definitely has demonstrated high potential to advance further, perhaps 1-2 levels in 3 to 5 years.

So, that is where I put her. I put her as that because, I can't see her really growing too, too much too fast when I'm thinking about a certain position. And that's why we have these conversations, and that's why I'm really grateful we were able to do this together. Because as you can see, about maybe 13, 14 of you who participated said, okay, let's… let's put her as a valuable performer.

Now… Putting her as a valuable performer, you're saying, yup.

She meets those expectations, she, and… but she can't do it alone.

But she… I think she can take on a greater scope.

Actually, I lied to you. I put her as an 8, a future star, because I don't think that she's a high-performing specialist just yet.

Okay, let's go and do one more together, because I'm really enjoying all the different, aspects that we're getting. So let's talk now about somebody who we may be a little more, have a little more in common with at our facilities, and we're going to talk about Elizabeth.

Elizabeth has been with the organization for 15 years. She does her job very well, and as I'm reading this, I'm going to go back. Okay.

Okay, she's consistent. She doesn't cause issues, she's reliable.

She sometimes joins stretch projects, but has been here long enough to know, been there, done that, and sometimes may be a bit apathetic during cross-departmental think tanks or group projects. She consistently meets those expectations in her current role, though, but she shows little interest in moving from where she is, and she enjoys being the subject matter expert in her area.

So, where would you place her? So, before we do the Slido, because I'm adaptable, and I was reading the chat, is let's keep this up for a minute. So when we're looking here, you can… where does she fit here? You probably are really good at, right, these performance placements. And then look at potential. Specialized or expert talent, and or may have reached career potential. Could be promoted one or more levels in career or lateral move with greater scope and challenge or demonstrate a potential to advance further, maybe 1 to 2 levels, in three to five years. So, Leslie, can you move us on to Elizabeth's Slido, please?

Thank you. All right, everyone.

Let's see what good conversation we can get out of here.

We are going to… I think the Slido froze because I was clicking around, and that is absolutely okay. I think you get the upper… I think you get the picture, but this is a great time for me to answer one of the questions, is what if someone has a long, varied background, but has been underemployed in the agency, and is bored without opportunity to show what they are truly capable of? I am so happy you asked that question.

Because succession planning is going to fix that problem. And if you just stick with us for this section and next session you're gonna see how that works. So, thank you, thank you, thank you. All right, I'm gonna move the slide now, so I'm gonna take over there, Leslie.

Nope.

Oh, we got Elizabeth on here. Yeah, right? If we got this great, solid performer, and how do I know that she doesn't want to move? Because we had that survey, remember? And you're going to make that survey specific to your department, and you may have people… and you're going to have to talk to your staff when they're getting that survey, because they may very well not understand.

And if your department is a lot like my department, is we go from high school graduates to PhDs. So, there are just going to be different words that are going to resonate with different people, but at the end of the day.

This is why your team communicates about this, because we want to bring to the attention what is going to work the best for the agency.

So, awesome. Okay.

You… these are examples of 3 different matrix boxes, descriptions, but in the chat, you have all 9 of them. Okay.

So hopefully now you can see how these tools can work for you regardless of your agency size. So, if they ended up in those right-hand boxes that were yellow, that is kind of giving you that insider look that they probably have a lot of potential and high performance.

Even middle performance with a lot of potential. And so, right there, that's going to help you to take that information, plus those evaluations, plus their exhibited work, and that… those great survey results, or those conversations you've had with them, and this is how you are going to create your talent pool.

And hopefully you can see why it being decided by management and self-interest is so important.

We assume a lot, and a lot of times those assumptions aren't necessarily true or as accurate as we'd like. I also ask you not to, because you've got an answer one year, don't assume it's going to stay the same. We have in our organization, seen in our first year where people were like, so happy where I am, love it, love it, and then the next time, it was like, you know what? Now that I've kind of seen what we're doing.

I really want to learn this, this, and this. So, and we'll talk more about that.

Okay.

Let's go to the next one.

Okay, so once you've identified those key positions, you're going to need to ask the people holding those key positions to answer some questions. Now remember, I'm flipping back to key positions.

We have two sets. We have key positions, which are the ones that we need to concentrate on with the potential that we're going to have to fill them.

And then we have the talent pool, which may or may not be the right fit for that… those exact positions. So now I'm moving back to key positions.

In the example, Director that Tiffany did, Director was deemed a key position. So that Director will get questions, knowledge management, and we have some of these questions in the resources. I'm going to tell you, that there are a lot more questions that you can add, and a lot of these questions you can delete, and we're going to talk about that right now.

So, why are they here? Well, it's because we want to start with some general questions to get them moving and to feeling comfortable with answering them.

Because if you already… if your agency, already has these questions that they can start with, and you can start drafting and reviewing training plans, and kind of fill in the gaps, it was excellent that Tiffany used the word gap analysis, because that's exactly what you're doing.

Now, if your agency is already a master in training, and you have a comprehensive training plan for each position, well, then these questions might not be pertinent, and you can dig deeper. I'm going to get into that.

But by looking at some of these questions, you will notice that the answer… the more detail and specifics, it goes above and beyond just the position description. So, for example.

How critical is it that this knowledge is documented and shared? I can look at your position description and see what you do.

But… What is that knowledge that I need to pass on to you that you're not going to find anywhere else? Some of the questions ask for concrete answers, but most questions are going to allow the person completing the questionnaire to really kind of just talk and write or type.

So we're going to talk about how we're going to utilize these, in training plans, and align them with core competencies next session. But we found in our health department, just recently that getting those resource management was kind of a difficult concept for a lot of people. They were getting a little hung up on it being just… well, you're asking me, Joy, just to rewrite my position description, I don't understand. So that alerted Tiffany and I, like, okay, we gotta come… we gotta come up with some better questions.

So, let's just look at this slide. If somebody leaves your agencies, what do you already know about that position that they're vacating? You know the position description. If you have training plans, you know them.

You probably know how to use the same software.

You know where there's written policies, if you should have policies, procedures, and whatnot. If you don't have those, that's okay. This gives you the opportunity to fill in those gaps.

So those are things you know.

But what don't you know that you have to really wring out of that person's brain? What knowledge, what everyday awesomeness do they bring to the position that you will never get from the best training plan or the best position description? We want their contacts throughout the community.

We want to know what meetings they attend, and which ones they actually find useful.

It may sound, silly, but I think if you think about it, public health is all about partnerships and networking.

And you and I both know that when we're looking for resources for our participants or our clients, when we need assistance with our community health assessment, we know exactly what contacts in the community there are, and you want to make sure that that list is there for the person who succeeds into that position.

So they know how they're spending, you know, their first few weeks, and who they're meeting.

How about those once-a-year duties that often get overlooked? You're not going to have that written in a position description, but you might have that in your brain that you might not even think about because you're on autopilot.

That once-in-a-decade duty. I think we all have that one. So make sure that those are getting jot down somewhere.

And then, this one is kind of funny, but it is extremely relevant to ours, is what to or not to say to the cranky FedEx delivery man. Now, we have a Cribs for Kids grant, and those cribs are extremely heavy, and if you know how to make, if the receptionist at the front window knows how to make friends with him right away, or in our case, don't talk to him at all, just point to the door, and don't ask him how he is, because he doesn't want to talk to you, then he will deliver all of them, and he will get out of your way quickly, and… You'll be in a better place.

Okay, so what did we learn today? By using the key position categories, and hopefully you can use that Excel spreadsheet that was created for you.

And the questions along with the position inventory sheet. You can now identify, or start to identify, some of the key positions, and know which positions are the most important to prioritize.

I cannot say this enough.

Every single position within your organization is a key position in the sense of If we didn't need the position, we wouldn't have it. So when this is getting explained to managers and your team, and they're explaining it to their staff, make sure they realize that this is prioritization of potentially vacant positions, not that somebody is more important, or somebody holds a position more important than them just for an FYI, when we did this the first round of all my direct reports, I only had two key positions identified within our organization of about 40 people. We had 11… 40 positions, we had about 11, positions identified, and we had, about 10. 10 people, identified in our talent pool, and they're not gonna match up, and that's okay.

The other thing is we talked about that talent pool identification. We did that by how do we assess the ability, the aspiration, and the engagement we gave you some tools. The performance potential matrix, the staff survey, your annual evaluations, anything else that you have there, but also don't underestimate the power of the discussion that you're going to be having in those team meetings.

So next session, we're going to tie in the importance of the collection and management of that knowledge from your staff, so the information can be passed on. And by doing these things, it helps to support the continuity of your work. Remember, the whole point of succession planning? Is that it is a roadmap to business continuity.

That's all it is. And so, how do we… how do we make this as seamless as possible over time for you, your governing body, and your community? We're going to establish a process for centralizing documentation, perhaps. I don't want to hear, if you want to know everything about this job, just look in the second drawer on the left, right? We want to centralize this information. And we will also, next time, talk about assessing current staff competencies and comparing them to the next level of core competencies, because those are going to become your amazing goals for your annual reports and whatnot. No longer are we going to have goals that say, you shall do what your job description says.

Okay, I know you don't write it exactly like that, but if you really had to do a check of the goal section of your annual reports.

Do they kind of look like that? And if they do, is that really investing in the person, to go back to that chat question, is just because somebody right now might not be in your talent pool, or they might not have a key position that they are vying for, or in their head, working toward.

Every single person is being invested when you do succession planning just by the sheer fact that you are looking at their position, their training plans their aptitude, and you are giving them goals that is going to make them more valuable, regardless of any position that they take on, because you're investing in them. And that is what's going to keep them there, whether there is an opportunity for their growth or not right now. And it also is going to be a catalyst for those people who have been underemployed for so long.

To be like, wait… I can do that. And then you identify that in them and give them opportunities.

So, we're… we have wanted to make sure we left plenty of time for questions, and so we absolutely have.

Our references are always here. I know you get these slides. ASTHO is amazing at getting them out to you. There is a… evaluation. But as you leave today from this part, because I want you to stick around for the questions, is I ask you, most importantly, to give yourself grace. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

And with every step, you are going to see benefit of your agency, and many times you're going to see the benefit in areas that you didn't even realize you were going to see benefit.

So I'm going to turn it back over to AC and ASTHO, and maybe we can start looking at some questions together. Thank you.

ROTHENBUECHER:
Wonderful, thank you so much. I'm seeing a couple of questions. I'm kind of scanning the chat and the Q&A to see what hasn't been answered. So, I see a question here.

In the Q&A portion, I can see the value of the staff survey and how useful it could be to have… if you have a culture that values openness and transparency about growth and development. My health department, morale is low and turnover is high, and I think people would be hesitant to respond to the survey. How would you navigate that situation?

Okay.

That is a whole nother three-part session. No, I'm just… I think it's a great question, and I think to be… to… and the reason why I can smile about it, and Tiffany and I can smile about it, is because if there has been a point in your life, in your career, that this has not been the truth, then you've… you're either really good at not paying attention, or, or you have just simply, like, put it out of your brain.

So… you are absolutely correct, anonymous attendee, that you… there are just some things that are just a heck of a lot easier when you have worked on the culture of openness and transparency. So, if you find that right now, doing this whole big project is not going to work.

I ask you still come to the next session, because you are going to learn things, regardless if you do succession planning or not, that's really going to help with your morale.

I don't know what it's… what your organization is set up like.

But usually, that morale, I'm assuming you do maybe a needs assessment or an employee engagement survey every few years. We try to do that here in line with PHWINS.

And, even if you say, oh, Joy, I could not do that, like, no one would answer it, then do yourself a favor, go to the PHWENS website and get the employee satisfaction portion of the PHWENS survey that is either small, mid, or large health department.

And I don't know if you ever have an opportunity to, like, have an all-staff forum or anything, but talk about those results. So it's not like you're really talking about you or the people within your agency, but you're saying, you know, morale is tough right now, and there's a lot of turnover. And, you know, this is something, if you normalize that, right? You know, life right now is kind of tough for public health.

And we know that some of the positions that we have here are high in turnover because of the burnout rate. And then, once you kind of see that, and you get the conversation rolling, then I am going to ask you as the administrator, and if you're not the administrator, hopefully you can talk to the administrator, after they look at that PH1 survey to see, you know what, if we get some compassion fatigue training, and we have everyone go, if we do some grief training for our staff, if we do some mental health first aid training.

That's a great way to get that going.

DAY:
I also think, too, that that goes back to… Class 1.

Where that is part of why it is so important to really make your case before you start rolling this stuff out. You want to be able for your leaders of succession planning, your succession planning team, your, you know, upper management, you've got to have them bought in.

Then I think it also goes back to well, if you have any familiarity at all in trauma-informed care, right, one of the big principles of that is being able to do something where I'm gonna tell you something, and what may be different from what you're used to is I'm also going to follow through and keep my promise of it.

So, to that end, what I mean is… you're gonna go have those, like I talked about.

Have your SME go to those department meetings. Explain this, and this is another great example of why I think it's important that your subject matter expert who is guiding succession planning is not your health commissioner, is not HR, is not on the management team, because that person is another peer, in a way. They may be a leader, you know, but they're going to be somebody who's you know, I'm not sitting and giving you the same old stories that you're getting from, you know, all of the big dogs or whatever, that they've got the buy-in and can explain it. And then, you may have to give it that 3 years, or whatnot, because I think what we're starting to see as we're in our second iteration is some of those people who the first time through were like, psh, whatever with this, here we go again, or whatever that might look like have now seen Oh! I get it, that's why there's a stretch project for this person, because they said they want a stretch project, or that's why I'm not getting these extra big projects that I don't have time to do right now, because I said, I'm not interested in that. There's no… there's no right or wrong, but we want those to go to the people that we want them to go to, right? That have that buy-in. And so that's where I think, too, we're starting to get some of those different answers this second go-around, in terms of staff interest, because they're starting to get it now, too. And… If there's a history of that burnout or fatigue then you've gotta be able to know inside that it doesn't get fixed overnight, Rome wasn't built in a day, and so I may have to give this a little bit of time so that some of these people start figuring it out, too. But I think what you're gonna see is those ones who are your natural, kind of, innate leaders.

They're gonna pick up on this, and hopefully they're… going to bring some followers with them, who are gonna say, oh, well, if Steffi Su gets it, and Steffi Su says this is really great, well, maybe it's not so bad after all, because Steffi Sue always knows what she talks about, you know, and that type of thing. Like you see with everything, right? Like, you see with everything.

ERMIE:
Yeah, you're just gonna have your early adopters, you're just gonna… you know, so I want to just go through some of the quick questions in the chat before we get to the second one in Q&A, because that one's a good one too, but okay.

DAY:
Yes, it is a bit like change management, I would agree.

ERMIE:
Absolutely. Okay, the underemployed, we kind of talked about that one. Okay, there's a question here, and I tried to answer it, and I think I sent it to the wrong person, but, the staff interest survey, is that different from the staff development survey? It might be the same for you every health department has all different surveys, right? So, if you have something that you're already using, and your staff are all… you know, keep it simple. Don't make another piece of paper just to make another piece of paper. So, if your staff development survey we'll answer these questions for you.

Awesome. I'm happy that you… I'm happy that you have that.

I am hoping to really connect this process to staff development.

Yes, I don't know how many times I say this, I'm like, it doesn't even matter if they're in the talent pool. You are investing in everyone by doing this. So, Joy, what do you mean? I mean because yesterday, I had a conversation with a manager, and she said, I really thought that this person was going to answer their survey that they were going to want to develop within this… this agency. And they just said they're really happy with what they're doing, and that's really disappointing to me. And I said.

Okay.

Today, they answered that way, but think about that position within your health department that maybe has changed in the time you've been there. Or maybe think of someone in another job you've had where you were like, oh my gosh, that person was the best. I'll pick on that FedEx man. That best FedEx man in the whole world, and I wish everybody was just like him, and then the next time you get Mr. Cranky Butt, and now he's stuck with us, and you say, if only I… what could his boss have done or what could this guy, before he left, have taught him to make him not so irritable, or not so… that's all succession planning is. So even if they're not moving to a higher position, you are exchanging knowledge, you are making your training plans more robust, and then, to make this real full circle, to really blow your brain today, is that when you do those needs assessments, and you do those employee satisfaction surveys in the future you are going to start seeing it ticking up when it says, opportunities for advancement, whether I'm taking them or not. Opportunities for training. Our training here has gotten so much better, I think, since Tiffany has brought this to our agency, because we can now say, it really wouldn't hurt everyone in this agency to get trauma-informed care training.

So, hopefully, that helps a little bit.

DAY:
I think also, too, going back to when we talked about this focus on hierarchy.

We've seen some of this at our agency, where, you know, let's say you have… we have several nurses, and we have a director of nursing who actually obtained her position somewhat early in her career, and will probably retire out as a director of nursing. And… so for other nurses, the comment, and especially younger, has been, well, there's nowhere for me to go. I mean, what is there? Director of Nursing, and that's… she's gonna retire, like, 4 years, maybe, before I would.

But the thing is, is that a nurse isn't always… doesn't… isn't limited to just being a nurse. For example, maybe there are certain skills that that person could develop, and eventually the emergency planner and coordinator position becomes open, which is a whole other ball of wax.

But if we can start developing those skills now in this person that is high potential, high performing, that would be a door that could potentially be open. So, I don't know if we've mentioned this yet much in our first two courses.

But you don't always have to stay this way. Within the department organization, there may be positions where you can go this way.

Likewise, when it comes back to the training, even if you're staying in this position, do you want to stay right here is really good.

Or are you gonna start working your way to across this way, you know, in more of a horizontal, right? Where you're becoming more and more of an expert in your field, you know? You can be a PHN2 forever, but you may be a PHN2 that… you do very good work, or you may be a PHN2 that… this is an expert PHN2 that has really, mastered those core competencies required of this position, and knows what they're doing within this position. And those can look very, very different than you know, a different PHN2, if that makes sense.

ROTHENBUECHER:
Thank you, and then, yes, there's this question, I saw you, responded to a question around, kind of, training and other, supports around performance evaluations in general, so thanks for answering that, Joy.

I'm not sure. There may be some, I wonder, on-demand trainings on some of the public health training centers that might be worth looking into.

I'll consider, you know, I think we'll consider if ASTHA will provide that kind of training, but, I think if there are AST of resources, we can… we can think about that. The other question is kind of around how to help change the culture that is designed not to interact with other departments or to move up kind of how to balance that. You've kind of touched a little bit on culture and change management, but I don't know if there's anything else you both want.

DAY:
And I think to tie in with that particular one, and I think we… we'll get a little more into it in the next session as well, is I think, really, and Joy, if you see this going somewhere else, by all means, because you are the health commissioner, not I, but I think it kind of goes back to… to that review process, and if you start making that review process more robust.

And it is more clear, you can start really looking at again, those core competencies that sometimes are really tough concepts. Some of the system stuff and the things that we do at this level can be very hard to wrap your brain around, but once you start breaking it down and you get it, it just starts fitting into place. So I think when you start looking at, as opposed to, well, this one's a nurse, and this one's a social worker, and this one does environmental health, but instead you're looking at this one has mastered core competencies around fiscal and budgeting concerns. This one has mastered or does core competencies with communications, or needs some more help, and then that's where you find that training, because you want to build them up to master that stuff that's in their own position descriptions, but then also, how do those compare to other positions across the board because multiple different departments and specialty positions are probably going to need to have strong skills in communications, for example.

And that's where you can look at some trainings that can start overlapping. And I would say to that question in the Q&A, it's gonna come back to that team you're forming. Your leadership team and your succession planning team, which is represented by those different departments, so that they're starting to come together, and then they can see their commonalities instead of the differences.

ERMIE:
And just, I'm gonna… that was perfect, and so I'm gonna take it back to a different… a different lens is the culture that is designed not to interact with other departments or to move up. You're in that position for life.

That must be really sad.

Right? I mean, let's call it what it is. If you're in a position and you don't feel that you have any growth, that must be really disappointing. And I can only imagine that your high performers are going to be the ones who are going to leave.

Because they're saying, I don't see anything. And then, I'm gonna say it.

It just is an environment for the government worker. And that is… and we're not, we know we're not. We do way too much to have that old stigma put on us. So, how to help change the culture that is designed not to interact with other departments? I would start with not even worrying about work do you ever just get everybody in the room? I don't know how big you're… Amy, I have no idea. You could be from 4,000 employees. But, you know, did they ever have opportunities to work in cross-department in cross-department teams. I started something, the other year, it's called Think Tanks.

And I give them 1 hour. You get 11 to 12, I am not in the room, no manager is in the room, you get… oh, I have my… my board is right there. You get a whiteboard, and you get a marker, and I give you a question, and there is no right or wrong answer, and you… and at 12 o'clock, you must break apart.

And you just answer the question, and you put all of your ideas, and I started with something easy, like, we have this blank wall, this long hallway, and it was blank. I said, what do you want to do with that hallway? And I… you cannot imagine, in 53 minutes, from people all over the… all over 6 departments came together, and we… I'm gonna get a picture, and I'm gonna put it in the next slideshow. And we have this most amazing wall now that every staff member here has their own personalized frame, and they can switch out pictures, or whatever they want, all the time, and they can talk about what they like to do at home, and they have pictures of grandkids up there of people, and whatnot, so… I would say maybe look a little bit more into culture itself.

Instead of succession planning first. But we do feel for you, Amy. We've all been there. Some of us, you know, I'm sure there's a lot of people here who are like, oh, darn, I'm glad she asked that question, because I feel that way, too. So, thank you for all the questions. I appreciate you. 250 people, and we are half full for our organization.

Wow.

So definitely screaming the need for, definitely screening the need for… for something, so… would love to be your friend, Amy, so… reach out, we'll be there for you.

ROTHENBUECHER:
Well, thank you, everyone, for your question, your comments, and to our amazing presenters, we have popped some evaluation links in the chat, as well as the landing page that we mentioned. I know some people were having trouble with downloading the handouts, so just know that you can find those documents on the link there, and we're excited to have you join us for Session 3.

So, there's information on registration in the chat, and we will see you again soon. Thank you!

Succession Planning Part 3 of 3: Putting the Plan Into Action

The final session walks through a phased approach to implementing a succession plan over time. Participants will learn how to align the Core Competencies for Public Health Professionals with position descriptions and training needs, as well as how to integrate succession planning into performance reviews and staff development goals.

Speakers:

Joy Ermie, Health Commissioner, Henry County Health Department
Tiffany Day, Public Health Specialist, Henry County Health Department

Resource

Succession Planning Part 3 of 3: Presentation Slides (PDF)

Webinar handouts coming soon.

A.C. ROTHENBUECHER::
Welcome!

Well, welcome, everyone, to Succession Planning, Part 3 of a three-part series from ASTHO. We're excited that you're here joining us today. You may have joined us from previous sessions, or this may be your first one, so thank you again for being here.

I'm excited to tell you a little bit more about what you're going to learn about in today's session. So, for Session 1, we talked about building the case for succession planning, and in Session 2, we laid the groundwork. Now, we're taking it into action.

We will continue to walk through the phases of succession planning. You'll learn how to align those core competencies for public health with position descriptions and training needs, and how to integrate succession planning into performance reviews and staff development goals.

Additionally, we will have a little bit more time, on this last session for Q&A than some of the previous sessions, so if you have something that's bubbling, some questions that you have for our presenters, feel free to put them in the Q&A function throughout the presentation, and we will definitely leave, adequate time to address those today.

A few reminders before I turn it over to our presenters. As I mentioned, there is a Q&A function, there's also the chat function that you can use to let us know who's in the room today. Through the chat, we'll also be sharing, about 15 minutes into the presentation, some of the handouts related to this session, as well as links to where to see the recordings, access the slides, etc, and learn more. We will be, also uploading the handouts to those websites, in the future, as we work on some accessibility pieces for the documents, so stay tuned for that.

And… last reminder would be you can, click on closed captioning at the bottom of your screen if that's something that you would like to have for this session. And with that, I will turn it over to Joy and Tiffany from Henry County Health Department. Thank you!

JOY ERMIE:
Thank you, hi, everyone. And before, we begin I'd really like to extend a since… on behalf of Tiffany and myself, a sincere thank you to ASTHO, especially AC Allison and Leslie. The behind-the-scenes work that all of you don't see to make these webinars so successful is commendable. So, thank you very much, ladies.

Okay, now let's see if I can figure out how to get going. All right. So, A.C. already talked about our series learning objectives and our session objectives, so I am going to dive right in here. So let's do a review from Session 1. We defined succession planning, we introduced you to the names of the six phases that are in front of you of succession planning. We went into detail, then, about the first two phases, preparation and alignment.

Remember, succession planning is a roadmap to ensure business continuity. It helps create a process of identifying talent to fill critical roles or key positions when vacancies occur. Succession planning also provides a development program for that identified talent who possesses the desire and aptitude for that next role.

We asked you at that time to gather your org chart, a list of potential retirements, your strategic and workforce development plans, and to consider who would serve on your succession planning team. We asked you to draft your goals and your business case, and we went over all of that together.

In our Session 2, we dove into the third phase, which is analysis. We introduced various tools to assist you in identifying those key positions and your talent pool, ensuring their ability, their engagement, and their aspiration. Now, remember the talent pool is decided by management and self-interest, and that pool requires transfer of knowledge. So we want to take that knowledge, the competencies, and the training to help transition to that pipeline for succession planning. In other words, don't wait till the person has a job to start seeing if they're the right person for that job.

Some of the tools we introduced to you included those key position categories and questions, along with an Excel sheet to help you identify those key positions a little easier. We asked you to keep in mind that even though all positions within your health department are important and valued. Not all will be identified as a key position for succession planning.

We also, have examples of staff interest surveys to share with you, and that's how you're going to help to gauge the desire and the aspirations of your staff to see if they have… if they have that desire to be part of the talent pool.

We introduced you to the potential matrix, or the nine box, and that's used by management, to measure potential for advancement and performance that helps, again, that other half of identifying your talent pool.

We began talking about the importance of knowledge transfer, and we're going to pick up on that today, because we want to take that knowledge transfer from those key positions, not only what they do each day, but all the tips that they can pass on, and we're gonna get going to explore how to get all this prep work and bring it to life today.

Phase 4, strategy, in addition to knowledge management, collection and disseminating. So we can develop training plans based on some gap analysis of core competencies, and then Tiffany's gonna start with the metrics, and she's gonna go through and teach us some lessons we learned along the way until the end of the phases.

Now, you have your key positions identified, so you're going to want to ask the people who hold those key positions to answer questions, to get them thinking about all that they do during the day, mostly on autopilot. So remember that purpose of knowledge management is to capture knowledge so you can establish procedures that will lead to the creation of training documents that you're going to utilize for that talent pool to ensure the continuity of work once those key positions are vacated. And you want to do this by utilizing those training documents and those procedures that are easy to find, that are centrally located, and that you have consistency throughout the agency.

Now, that sounds like a lot of work, and it is, but like any system you put into place, once you have it there, it's gonna be so much easier to move forward.

I introduced this slide to you in session 2, but I just wanted to revisit it as an example of what I mean by knowledge management and those questions. So, by looking at these questions, you'll notice that some of them can answer in more depth about the specifics of a job above and beyond just what's in their position description. You're probably going to want to add… now, these are just six that I put up here, but in the resources that we've given you, I believe we gave you about 20 questions. You can add, and you can draw, because we want to draw out any underlying talents, competencies, and skills that are necessary to succeed in that position. So, if you find that some of these questions are a little too repetitive for that level of staff, or a little too repetitive for that key position that you've identified maybe you'll want to say, "hey, if… what's the number one skill that you need to do this?" Or, "of these 10 skills, check off which ones are the most important." Because at the end of the day, it is more than a position description, and we're going to dive more into that in just a minute, because this is how we get into those core competencies, and not just focusing on the functions.

So, core competencies. I introduced this in Session 1. At our health department, we use the Council of Linkages between academia and public health practice. You may use this, you may use something else. The domains within this document, there are 8 of them, and I have them listed here. And as you go through that document, the domains are broken down, and they get very, very specific. They even break them down in tiers based on the level of responsibility a staff person has within the agency.

Now, I would be lying if I told you that this document isn't confusing. I think that, at first, it was really confusing, and I think it was extremely overwhelming. How am I supposed to get a grasp of all this? So, you're gonna take note that from here on out, if you're familiar with this document, you may see that Tiffany and I changed some of the domain verbiage, and we shortened it, and we condensed it. We didn't change the meaning of it. We just sometimes, when you take out some of those words, and you make it a little easier for everyone to understand by abbreviating the core competencies, you can… you can explain it easier.

Now, Tiffany and I will always challenge you to utilize various tools, but adapt them to your organization. It's more important, in our opinion, yo understand what you're doing and why you're doing it, than to just go through the motions to check a box. So, as time goes on, and you learn, and you understand the process better, you will always have time to go back and revise and dig deeper. But for now, keep it manageable. If you wait until you understand every single concept and theory before you do anything in life, we would be stuck, right? Analysis paralysis. So sometimes we just gotta just go, yes, I saw a thumbs up, thank you.

So, on the next slide, I'm going to show you an example of why I prefer concentrating on core competencies more than just the essential functions of a position in succession planning. And hopefully this will illustrate to you what I mean by this. On the top of this slide, I took a tiny bit of the essential functions taken directly from a position description here at our health department for a public health nurse, too. As you can see, a public health nurse, too, assists the director of nursing in training others within the department, and keeps the department operations up and running in the Don's absence.

When thinking about this function, it can be very arbitrary as to how to prepare someone on the succession bench to do this. So, someone might think reading all the procedures relevant to the department is enough. "I read everything. I can handle it." Someone else might think, "I'm more of a hands-on gal. If I just shadow my director of nursing for a few weeks, and I just keep copious notes that's enough to keep the operations going."

Well, neither of them are wrong, but do either of those activities really, truly demonstrate that a person can do the job? I'm gonna challenge that those efforts are more of replacement planning for short-term, and not succession planning in the long run. So now I'm going to ask you to leave that function setting, and I want you to look down. And we're going to compare it to when we're looking at core competencies.

Again, I took just one small portion of the core competencies for this position from the position description. And I'm comparing a Public Health Nurse 1 and 2. Now, they both require critical thinking and decision-making, but you can see that there are more core competencies listed under PHN2 position description. So by focusing on those additional core competencies, you can assist those in the talent pool to improve those skills.

So, for example, You have a slew of public health nurse ones. They have… they show great performance, they show great potential, and they're all engaged, and they all have the aspiration to succeed and stay within your organization. So what are we going to do to stretch them to see how they're doing, and how we can, instead of worrying about the functions, let's worry about those core competencies.

So, I would like to see them engage in some professional development. It's something as simple as running a short training in their nurse's meeting. Perhaps you've identified that you have a nurse who is really great at explaining the importance of HPV series to a parent. So by asking them to share that skill and training to the rest of the department and the rest of the nurses, that not only gives you the opportunity to desert to observe how that individual prepares for a training and delivers it. But it also gives you the opportunity to give them feedback to help them grow and develop further. So, they're actually engaging in professional development. They might not realize they're doing it, but lo and behold, it gives you this amazing opportunity to see if that is a core competency that they have potential for. And that's gonna meet… that's gonna go a lot farther than just focusing on the functions.

Another great, reason why it's important to focus on core competencies and not just functions is because someone in your talent pipeline could succeed in more than one position, and this whole process is about training potential successors, not simply replacement planning. So when you start focusing on those core competencies, isn't it just about everybody could engage in professional development, so why not focus on that instead of seeing if they can run the Department of Nursing when the Don is off on maternity leave, because that nurse could actually run the health education department one day instead. So hopefully you can see that.

So I want to show you how we keep track of core competencies for each position, as it can become confusing really, really easy. So you're gonna notice that, in a few minutes, you're gonna start getting, if you haven't already, you're gonna start getting our resources. And one of our resources is an Excel spreadsheet, that is populated with all the core competencies organized by domains on the left side. So all you'll have to do, if you choose to use the tool, is enter your position titles across the top, and then you can utilize this to choose your core competencies. you can see the difference between the levels. And if you already have your core competencies done, you can simply populate it. If you're someone who uses something else, just clear out those first two columns, and you can put your own competencies in there.

Now, I'm not gonna lie to you, we were not disorganized coming out of the gate. Actually, we were anything but disorganized coming out of the gate, which is why we're a little more organized now. So when… and that's why we wanted to also share this with you, because we don't want you to have all the trials and tribulations that we did. So when we initially started the succession planning at our agency, and we got to this point, Tiffany and I realized that our management team was just not ready to bite off core competencies. They were having some issues understanding that document, and in an effort to keep our team engaged, and help them focus, we had them focus on other planning activities.

Remember, you've all been a part of a group where they lost you, right? Like, whether it's a class that you took, whether it was in college, whether it was just a QI project, and you're like, I was with you, and then I lost you, and I didn't want to ask, so now I'm 3 months into this project, I have no idea what's going on. We here have all felt that way in this health department, and we don't want that anymore. So we're saying, you know what? We're really starting to…watch faces, ask open-ended questions. Tiffany's great at facilitating that, and we say, you know what? We've confused them, let's put the brakes on it, let's do some work for them, we'll catch them up. I'd rather we go a little slower than lose them altogether.

Okay, so at that point, Tiffany and I did the best that we could, and we chose… we had some core competencies to start with, but we noticed they were all over the place, and they weren't even consistent across the same position. So we did our best to choose core competencies for each position. Now, as time went on, and our team really started understanding core competencies and what we meant by them, is they embraced that idea, they realized, oh yeah, that would actually be a lot better for developing our talent pipeline. And so we, with each of the departments, we revisited all of their staff's position descriptions, and they made changes as necessary, and then we updated position descriptions. And this was a labor of love. I mean, it took several months to do that. We had help from our HR specialists, we had help, to make sure they were standardized, and we had help from everyone in the department to make sure we weren't missing anything, as well as Tiffany and myself. I have also included our position description template in your resources. I am not saying that you need to use that, I just thought maybe if you saw that, you would understand how this all fits together.

So, let's look and congratulate yourselves at this point. Like, what have you accomplished at this point? You've identified key positions. Your talent pool is based on aspiration, ability, and…Engagement! And you asked all those key positions to start managing their knowledge, and now you've found a way to track competencies that are necessary for each of those positions.

So, when you identify that talent pool that might be on the succession bench for this key position, you kind of know where to start. So what's next?

We want to keep our staff engaged. We don't want to lose them. You don't want to be so hung up on succession planning that you forget that people are working now. So, performance reviews, in my opinion, are very important. They are a gift that you give your staff. Though you should be communicating with them regularly, and nothing in an annual review should ever be a surprise, this really gives you the opportunity to celebrate that employee. Take notes throughout the year. Make sure you remember the things that they've done well, not just the last month before you were writing it. So I believe that the review should be useful for me, the staff member.

It should integrate all the systems of the agency. I want to help the employee understand how they fit into the mission, vision, and strategic plan of the agency. If they have buy-in, they're going to be a more loyal, dedicated employee, because they understand how they fit in. And I think that is our jobs as managers every day, but especially when you're telling them all these great things, and you're setting goals for them, people want to know why. "Why do you want me to do this?" So that should help as well.

You know, evaluations allow you to allow you time to review their position descriptions with them. If you're not reviewing a position description at least once a year with your staff, I invite you to consider doing that, because that way you can see if there's things that they're doing that aren't on their position description, and vice versa. But also, you can start that conversation about the core competencies. And you can… and I'd really love for you to create meaningful annual goals. If the goals listed on somebody's annual review is simply a reiteration of their essential functions, you're doing both of you a disservice, because they should already be doing or learning the essential functions of their job. So, use those goals to further develop them, and I promise you, if you lean into the core competencies, it'll help you.

So, here's an example. Okay. I cut just a little… two little snippets out of an actual performance review, so that's why they look kind of…I don't know, wobber-jawed there, sorry. So your reviews may look very different than ours, and that's okay. They're whatever works for you, regardless of what your performance review template looks like, you can always weave in skills and competencies, okay? It's going to take a little practice, but you can do it.

So here you see, under that judgment and decision-making question, is over on the… so the ways ours is set up is we have the question on the left. And then a yes, no, NA, and then we have comment section. So here in the comments section, the manager mentioned a core competency, financial skills, specifically learning about the relationship between finances, program structure, and service delivery. Okay, that would make sense. So, at the end of their review, if you would flip to the back page, and I just snipped it here on the bottom, number two, "Jessica will attend one meeting per quarter with her manager and the director of finance to become familiar with the budget and make connections with service delivery." That is a core competency. Financial skills and understanding and management skills, that is a core competency. And if I just went back to Jessica's position description and said, "you will meet with each of your home visitors that you supervise 1.5 hours a week for the next year." How am I growing her? That's an essential function. That's something by our accreditation that she has to do. That doesn't grow her. That doesn't help me to see if she's ready to… to go in that talent pipeline and succeed to a higher position. But think about it. If Jess is in these meetings, let's say she's in one meeting a quarter, probably by the second or third quarter, she's going to start connecting those dots, and maybe she's going to start talking in those meetings. And then maybe she's going to start seeing that, and she's going to have ideas, maybe some quality improvement ideas, and then she's actually going to be able to go back and talk about this to her peers and those she supervises, because as a coordinator, she can now talk on a different level. So, as they become more comfortable, and as they learn, this goal is gonna evolve.

So, what if Jess wasn't identified to be in the talent pool? Do you have to do evaluations differently for different people? Absolutely not. Think about it. Even if Jess wasn't identified to be in the talent pool, let's say Jess is 2 years from retirement, and she's like, "I'm good. Remember that matrix? I'm a solid performer. I have hit my ceiling, and I am happy."

You would still do this with Jess, perhaps, because wouldn't it still improve her efficiency and her effectiveness if she understood how the program side and the fiscal side were married? And if she is a long-term subject matter expert in this department, staff look up to her, so, she could be your ally when it says, "guys, we cannot spend 2 hours on case notes, we gotta think about the finances." You know, when that comes from a director, it might sound like, "meh, meh, meh," but when it's coming from a peer who is respected and who has been there and who can explain it in their way, it's really helpful.

So hopefully, you can see you do not have to have two ways of doing something for the talent pool and the non-talent pool, because hopefully, you'd like to think in time that all of your staff are going to step up, and all of your staff are going to want to be part of that talent pool.

Okay. So we have, collected a lot of information at this point, right, from those knowledge questionnaires. But how do we take them and make something of it, right? You're not going to take 20 questions and say to the… somebody in the talent pool, oh, I want you to read what Joy said about the knowledge management of a health commissioner. No, no, no.

So what we do in our department, and I'm sure yours is the same way, is we have policies and procedures. You want to make sure you have those policies and procedures there. And then, from that, the next step, don't overthink this, guys, just start making a list of the things they need to do.

If you notice here, and I know it's small, but you'll get the slides, is I have a policy on the left that says immunization billing insurance companies. So here at our health department, we do, private, immunizations along with our, VFC and our public, coverage. So that doesn't mean that my training says,"read immunization billing procedure." You can break it down into really bite-sized steps. And as you're going through it, and you're clicking through each one of those, guess what happens? All those tips and tricks of the trade that were written on the knowledge management, this is where those come in.

So now, when you have this overlap of the person holding the key position that's leaving, the talent pool person that's coming in, or sharing those responsibilities, or just shadowing and just watching what they do, they're starting to see. "You know what? With immunization billing, I totally have to handle Anthem, and Paramount Insurance, completely different. So I'm really happy that they didn't have me just read the procedure, because that was a little too high level. It was more policy." So make sure that you're editing, and that you are correcting those training plans and those procedures.

So, think of it as a loop. You have the procedures, you train on them. All those things that just, you can't put in a procedure, because your procedures would be 800 pages long. You have little hints on your training plan, and then you fill in the gaps with that knowledge management. And if you notice there's a huge gap in your procedures that you're missing, just go in and edit and update your procedures. And then if there's something you no longer do, you can just delete it and move on.

Okay. Again, who does this work? Not your succession team. Your succession team does not do all of this work. Everyone does this work. How we did it here is that we took our procedures, we have them assigned to people within our software system, or some people still like paper, and we print them out, and we look at them and say, "do me a favor, you do the billing. Can you read these five… can you read these five procedures, and can you follow them? Don't do what you do, follow these and see if we're missing anything."

Awesome quality improvement right there. Then, you update those, and then you look at the training plan. So, your manager might just write those down. Then what we did is we gave those training plans, just that draft, back to the person who does the work, and says, "okay, now that you've looked at those procedures and those policies, take a look at this training plan. If you were to train someone on this. Are these the steps? Did we miss anything?" Communicating with your staff about what you're doing is extremely important. If you just walked up to somebody, especially somebody who's maybe a little sensitive, and said, "hey, I'd like you to review your policies, because I'm making a training plan for your position," they're probably gonna start crying and think they're getting fired. Okay, so don't do that. Communicate with your staff. Make sure your managers or your team, your succession planning team, know how to communicate that. Because not everybody's going to go to one person and ask. They're going to start gossiping. So you want to make sure that everybody is on the same page, and you want to talk about it often. Because at the end of the day, guys, there's a good chance that you're going to want to retire, and we have the time to do this now, so we're just going across the board, and we're doing some positions at a time.

"Well, why are you picking mine over theirs?" Well…When do you plan on retiring? "Well, I plan on retiring in 2029." Okay, well, she over there, she's 30, and she loves it here, and she doesn't want to retire in 2029, so I'm going to start with yours. "Oh, well, yeah, that makes sense." Just having that conversation really eases a lot of it.

Okay. So I do want to mention, as we discussed in earlier sessions, that not all positions will be filled by internal candidates. So, though we at our agency, we have not gotten to the point where we've created a recruitment plan that's super robust yet, but, we do have a plan in place, and I do, review and update our compensation plan. We did draft a new intern policy where we now pay our interns, and as you can see, by doing this work, I have not wasted any time, because this is going to come in handy, whether I fill a key position by an internal or an external candidate. Again, we're not here to waste your time, we're here to make sure that if it works, that we can spread it across the entire agency.

Alright. Tiffany, take us home!

TIFFANY DAY:
Okay, so…Again, this fourth phase is our strategies phase, and that's really all about the end game for the plan. So, we have goals, those are the things that we're gonna do, then to reach those goals. And then we need the metrics, or the way that's going to determine what's going to indicate if our goals have been met. So just to kind of put it all together, because I'm a very visual-type person, and I like seeing it like this.

Our initial strategies, and Joy started touching on these, our initial strategies, or goals, for our plan was we wanted to handle our knowledge management. We want to be able to capture the knowledge, we want to be able to use and share the knowledge, and we want to come up with a definitive way to house the knowledge.

And we have our next goal was we want to have training plans, and we want to have development plans, and Joy talked about that as well.

Our third was, we want to have recruitment plans specifically for the external candidates, which she just touched on. And then the fourth is our best practices. And this is a new concept for you. And we decided, then, that, we wanted to focus on these four areas, and I want to spend a little bit more time with these best practices with you right now, but before I do, I just, again, want to put out a reminder to you that you do not have to do all of these things at once. I think Joy kind of touched on a little of that as well, and remembering our… our fact is that you can only bite off what you can chew. I know we all have many, many spinning plates. Again, another little overused thing, but Rome was not built in the day, and neither is the succession plan, nor understanding a succession plan. So again, do what you can do, adapt if you want to adapt. These are not concrete black and white things that we're telling you you have to do this exactly like we do, and keep it manageable.

And having said that, let's go into looking at these, succession planning and management best practices. Now, these are from John Weisman. This is also a handout that you're going to have, and having followed along in the chat, it looks like we're having a little bit of issues for some people in accessing the documents as they come through, and I apologize for that. This is, the best practices, survey here that I have tabled is several pages. I believe there's 25 of them, 25 best practices, so I'm not showing you each one on the screen for you to see in the moment, so this will be something that if you can't access these now, you'll want to be able to go back to, and again, I apologize for that.

But, John Wiseman, he has created… I would call him, and not because I am some great reader and knowledge font of succession planning, but just having read enough of what I've read, this guy's kind of likes the succession planning for public health guru that's out there. I think he's really kind of the guy that really got this ball rolling, maybe about 10, 20 years ago, and so he created these best practices. And we used these best practices as our means of determining our metric. This was our metric, and my metric was, we have this survey, we handed this survey out to the succession planning team and just said, "fill this out!" You have these 25, areas that you can look at. So, for example, number one. Our agency uses student internships and or practicums as a means of identifying high potential and high-performance, employees for entry-level positions in our agency. Are we utilizing these interns? is basically the question. Do we use interns? So I asked everybody on our succession planning team, just put what you think. They could say, "we do this agency-wide, we do it in parts of the agency, but not agency-wide, we do not do this, or I do not know if we do this." For the sake of our metrics, what I deemed was, if the answers, if the majority of the team says the first two columns, yes, we're doing this agency-wide, or yes, we do it, but not necessarily agency-wide, I consider that we have mastered that best practice. We have put that best practice into place. We are utilizing it.

And the reason one of the… one of the reasons why I'm including, even if it's not department-wide, is because not every department, maybe, has had the opportunity to have an intern, even though they could theoretically have an intern. You know, the point is, we're not getting interns willy-nilly just to say that we have interns. We want this to all have a purpose and a place in this structure.

So, it's very possible that somebody may read that question and think, "oh, I've never had an intern, so we're not doing this as an agency-wide." And I think that, for me, for the purpose of our metrics, is a little bit of kind of playing with semantics, so I made that determined… totally just me! Made that determination of, this is the metric I'm gonna go by. So to determine if we are making, if we are meeting that best practice, if we have put the best practice into practice is those first two columns. Then, after, going through and looking at all of them, taking a look at what do we have on there that we should be working at? Where… where are we falling into things where maybe we didn't get the two columns, and I thought, "but why? Why didn't everybody say one or the other?" And those are the ones that I determined. And I did this myself, again, making it work for you, keeping it manageable, just like Joyce said. We did not want to overwhelm and flood our team. So we made those executive decisions of places where we could you know, maybe do some of the work on our own. In this, again, I want to say, pilot version of doing the succession plan, which, as a pilot, lasted about 3 years.

So I know sometimes that's hard to think that we're gonna try something, and it's gonna be a multi-year thing, but yes. So, I picked…15 best practices, 15 of the 25, and I know, I know out of the gate that sounds like a lot, but…bear with me and hear me out. So, of the 25, these are the 15 that we picked. I'm not going to sit and read them to you, that's not necessarily the important part of this, but this is what I want you to see: I'm looking at these 15. What I found was that many of these practices could be what I would call easy wins. For example, these are the ones I chose, and then if we take a look…I'm looking at 4 of the 15 I have in red, right? These 4 in red, I knew we were already doing, they, apparently, didn't know we were doing. That's gonna be a pretty easy win over the course of this process, to just simply make the awareness level, the left hand knowing the right hand, using that shared language, understanding what we're all talking about. So all I… I determined all we really need is more awareness on these four practices. Very likely that by the end, we could say, we're doing these four practices, based on the metrics that I determined, and the metrics, again, was the majority of the team, or all of the team, will be in one of those first two columns when I survey them at the end of this pilot. So, we have the red ones. So that's 4 of 15 we're probably gonna get. Now, these in yellow are literally going to be accomplished if we are doing the succession plan as we've talked about the prog… the process, right?

Number two, our agency will identify HPHP from our staff. Well, that's the whole thing with the matrix and determining who are those people going in the talent pool. So if we're doing that in the succession plan, we're going to make this best practice, right? We're going to assess our individuals for job competencies that are a level or more higher. We're gonna get a list of individuals to be developed for higher level positions. I mean, that's my talent pool, right? We're going to assign stretch projects. That's the whole point of what we've been talking about, right? Figuring out where they need to have a little more growth. So, again, I have 4 in red, I know we already do them. And now I have, what, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 more of the 15, so now I'm already at 10 of them, that I'm thinking, just by nature of doing this, we're gonna get done.

Then, if you look at and think about, and, we were asked to be reminded about HPHP, and again, that is your high-performing, high-potential employees, as you have determined through that process of, using the matrix, looking at that, ability and aspiration and engagement. Having done that, staff survey to determine if they have an interest in… in potentially being a part of the succession plan and being a part of developing their skills more. So those are going to be basically, your HPHP employees are those employees who have been put in your talent pool. And so, we will be, taking a look, then, if you think back to the very first class, if you were able to attend, and Joy did a really great presentation in that on the alignment of all of our plans, our systems, I want to go back to looking at our strategic plan and our priorities under the workforce development priority, and you can see we have a couple here that are essentially the same thing as if we were doing the best practice.

We talk about, expanding the internship program. Well, as we work on that strategic goal, I know student internships are going to help be a means of identifying individuals for entry-level positions, because what that is essentially saying is, we're going to create and utilize an internship program and then we can maybe… some of those frontline staff positions, those Tier 1 positions, we're gonna start utilizing our interns for that. And we have done that since this plan has rolled out. And we've gotten some fabulous interns. I can think of one off the top of my head that has just been an absolute score for our health department. And I know it was in part because of the strategic plan, in part because of this concept with the succession plan. So again, in terms of looking at best practices and our metrics. The… this is another easy win.

And, we are also doing, the pay, right, to retain employees. And as Joy talked about, too, it is very important we have determined strategically that we really put some time and effort into maintaining a fair and reasonable compensation plan that, you know, is a win for the health department and keeping business as usual and operations. But also, hopefully, a win for our staff as well, so that they are being compensated in a good way.

And then I had 2 others that I felt also tied into the workforce development. And these basically talk about the projects, cross-functional projects, having some learning projects. Well, part of our strategic plan is developing training for all positions, and also, utilizing think tanks and other projects for staff development.

They're basically the same thing. So now I've gone from… 15…to, 11, right? I believe I said, and then we're taking out 4 more, and we had that other group in there. That is going to now leave us... At this point, because I bolded the ones that matched with our strategic plan, and if you look, that leaves us with number 9.

So, out of those 15, the only thing, really, that is kind of newish, or gotta take some work on is going to be having formal meetings with people in our talent pool, and that's going to be used to define and develop their job descriptions and to create developmental opportunities to help prepare them for new positions in the agency. So, what we're basically saying is exactly what Joy said. She wants us working towards, a little bit earlier was this idea of, really taking a look at what is required of those core comps, what's required in a position description, utilizing that review process to see, have they been mastering it? Is there evidence of that in their personnel file, in their annual review? And if there's evidence of something that needs further development, then we can tie that in, and now we're going to create some stretch projects so they can start addressing some of those spots that are in their current position description, and or looking into maybe, you know, that level-up position, that leadership position. What are those core comps that we can help do?

And so, that's… I know I spent some deep time on this, but I really liked this because it can show you from 15 to really 1. And I felt like that's really full of a lot of opportunities for when we can say, you know what, we're doing that, then that's going to be a win for the team. There's going to hopefully be some value in having done the process, and they can see better some of the purposes of that. So hopefully that is connecting and making some sense for you guys as well.

So, the next phase, then, is, thinking about the implementation, but I guess it just hit me, I did want to stress another point, too, that when you determine your metrics, when you determine your goals you can do them however you want to do them, and even if you determine your goals to be… I just want to use the same goals that Joy and Tiffany used at hers. Your metrics can be different. Some other simple metrics based on our strategies that Joy had described could be maybe staff discussing core comps and annual reviews, saying spec… and then tracking that.

The number of positions that have a completed training plan, that could be a metric that you use. The number of, departments that have a training plan, if you're pulling that back, and you're looking, okay, I have the position training plans, maybe now I want what's department-wide type training plans for a specific division, or health department-wide training plans that every employee is going to have to participate in. So I just wanted to make sure that you're still kind of get that wheel turning on different ways that you can look at the metrics.

And then we're going to go into Phase 5. So, we have this all set up, as Joy reviewed back with you. We've created some goals. We have… which are our strategies of what we want to do. We have those metrics, or the ways that we're going to determine, is this successful? Is this working? Have we mastered this?

Now your next step is, one, you're gonna write the plan. And it can feel like another plan, and you're gonna just make me sit and have to write this one up, too, but it's very important that you make it formal, and you make it accessible to staff, because remember, again, we want to have transparency. We are not doing succession planning in a vacuum or in a bubble. This is not, you know, spy work that we're doing, you know, in the dark of night, in the cloak of, you know, mystery or any of that. Because if you do that, you… you're really setting yourself up to have a lot of challenges and struggles, because that is where, you know, staff will start overthinking, they will question, they're gonna potentially think there's favoritism going on, that it is not, objective, that it's more subjective. So the more you are open, that you're talking about what you're doing, this is not playing favorites, this is who can be developed, who wants to be developed. And even if you don't necessarily find them to be in your talent pool, they may still give you feedback of where they'd like to be developed, and that's only going to be better, because by the time you do your next version of this they may have decided, "you know what, I think I do want to learn some more stuff, I do want to grow." Or maybe they feel safer about succession planning, so that they know, "you know what, I feel like I can say I would like to do XYZ." So always keep that in mind, too. This is very much an organic living type document. It's not a one and done, and this is what we're going to do now for the next decade. We're going to come back and revisit. Why is it important to formalize the plan? Because you need to document, you need to communicate those decisions that have been made in the alignment, analysis, and strategy phases. You want to document and communicate the processes that you used.

So that you have that down there just for the same reason we are saying go document and make SOGs or SOPs on other things, right? It's that same type of, of purpose behind it. Additionally, keep in mind as well, this is essentially a sub-plan of your workforce development plan. So, as a sub-plan of another plan. You're going to want to have it documented, because you're probably going to want to put a piece in your workforce development plan that you're doing succession planning, that, you know, your purpose of that is not only to retain, keep, retain, find staff, but you're basically laying out your training plans, which is the whole point of a workforce development plan, right? So you've kind of, you know, they really kind of overlap into each other again, and that's going back to how all of this should be aligning with each other, right?

You're… as you write the plan, if you're thinking, like, in a literal sense of, how do I lay this out, how do I write the plan, probably can really mirror whatever your workforce development plan looks like, and the layout of that with just the different topics and the different stages and phases going through it. You also, again, we talked about the accessibility. For us, we are utilizing an online format at PolicyStat. 100%, absolutely every staff member can get into PolicyStat, so there's absolutely no reason, I mean, there's gonna be reasons, but there's no reason for any staff member to say, I never saw it, or I can't say, oh, where's that? Or if they do, it's on policy style, all you have to do is put right in that search bar, succession, I bet you get to SUC, and succession plan's coming up, you can't miss it. So… so again, that's that…being driven, always being driven by transparency. Transparency. And then, of course, you just simply need to do the thing, right? You're gonna do the things. You're gonna do all those strategies, and you're gonna manage their execution. So you're gonna keep on meeting, that's… this is what we did. We kept on meeting, we kept our regular monthly meeting of the succession planning team, ee continued, we would discuss issues, we could problem solve, we would continue to keep on learning, because they did not have this as well as we did, and I did not have this as well two years ago for myself as I do today. And I'm still… yeah, I'm sitting here planning on this, and I'm still looking up stuff and learning and growing, hopefully.

You may be developing forms that might be necessary, that might be the way that you look and that you operate. Again, you're going to want your housing system, whatever that might be. It could be, you know, just a shared file folder that you guys can all get into yourselves. It could be something more formal, like we have, but whatever works for you guys.

You may want to start involving HR, if that's needed, as you're executing your strategies and you're looking through your metrics to, really start rolling out maybe some of the training and some of the different things that you're going to do. Again, we kept meeting as a team monthly. We also met with departments. At different times, I would meet with different departments, and we also talked about succession planning in all staff meetings, which we have quarterly here. We created train… those… the training plans we talked about, we reviewed the core competencies, we updated them, we reviewed with leadership for understanding of these concepts, we moved into updating position descriptions as needed, and we really are… worked on following our review process as we redesigned it, incorporating in the staff survey feedback, incorporating in those core comps so that we could utilize that information in the future as well.

So, Phase 6, then, is our evaluation. And what we did then for the evaluation is, guess what? We reviewed those best practices. So I pulled that survey out again, had them do that whole survey, and I looked at what's in those two columns, we, met and discussed as a group, and I would probably say we did this over two, if not three, different monthly meetings. So again, even the evaluation can take a little time, right? It's not gonna be, okay, in 30 minutes, we'll have evaluated this. We, so we would discuss what were our successes? What worked well? Where are our opportunities where we can improve? What can we do differently or better? What were some of the barriers that made this hard or challenging, or difficult or unable to be done? And then repeat those processes, right? We're going to… after we have, met and talked about this stuff, we're starting it back over, so we're going to determine what changes we need for staffing, what are our needs, what are going to be the goals of the plan this time around.

We redid the staff survey, we redid the key positions and the matrix. We redid the knowledge management, and coming up with maybe some new versions of those questions, and then new versions of the new versions of the questions as well. So that can always continue. So again, as we went through our evaluation of it, as, and seeing… seeing how we think we did, we had our four strategies. Now, we definitely… we captured our knowledge, we had a system put into place, and the training plans, the development plans, underway, we started working on that.

The recruitment plans, you know what? That didn't happen. Externally, we really haven't sat as a collective, in the team, as it applies to succession planning, and really talked about, these are the things we're going to do for recruitment, these externally, and these are, like, the goals of what we want, these are the metrics. We didn't do any of that. And that's okay, guys. That is absolutely okay. You don't… you don't have to have it. Also, I think that's a really great carryover, too, for other staff members to say, just because you didn't do, doesn't mean you're a failure. I think we knocked it out of the ballpark on our pilot. And so, if we didn't get to that, we didn't get to that. Doesn't… doesn't mean we're, you know, bad, or good, bad, and different. Didn't happen. Time is time, right? And then, of course, the best practices, which, as I said, we repeated that process with the survey.

And, again, remember how we had 15? So I gave the survey again. The team responses of those first two columns. Near… most of those goals were met. We're gonna continue what we're doing with those met goals. But those are pretty much considered that they are being actively utilized, and until something different would come up, if we surveyed again and they fell out of those two columns with the majority, that's something that we're rolling, we're doing. The four highlighted in yellow, we kept those because based on our metrics, we were not meeting them. And by that, I mean I did not have the majority of the succession planning team answering in columns one or two that we either do it agency-wide, or we do it with some of the departments. And that's alright as well. 4 out of 15? Not so bad. We're gonna keep working on that to try to make it… whether that means it's just more of, you know, just making people more aware of what we're doing, or if it's, okay, we have to kind of go back to the drawing board and see why are we not… if we're not doing this best practice, what's holding that up? And then, we added 4 more, which I believe are going to help with a deeper dive into the succession planning process, as we all know so much more than what we did at the start of the pilot.

And I believe there was a question in the chat about if the slides are going to be available, and I do believe that the slides will be available, and I'm sure that they'll let us know a little more detail on that, too, as we wrap up.

Then what we did as well, for just a little bit deeper, right? I'm making this just a bit more formal, not crazy formal, not, you know, you need to have a doctorate to be able to understand it. I did not go get an MBA either. I'm just a health…public health girl, trying to live in a public health world, but I did try to make them at least smart this time, right? And so I have just 3 very simple goals. We want to add depth to the bench. Well, how am I gonna know? What is my metric? The number of key positions with 2 or more HPHP employees or talent pool, employees on the bench. So if I have something that's been identified as a key position, so let's say I'm looking at my director of finance position who's going to retire within 5 years, what I would like to see is at least 2 on the bench. Two people that we have identified that could be on the bench in that. Is that necessarily going to happen? No, it may have required skill sets that we don't… we simply don't have the employees to do because their areas of expertise are different. Or, maybe we do, and they just need to learn some bigger managerial-type skills, Who knows?

Goal 2, increase the mastery of core competencies by our talent pool employees, those HP, HP employees, and I'm looking at that, the percentage of competencies mastered at the time of being placed in the talent pool in 2025, and in 2027. Now, has this… as we have been starting to roll these out, have we actually… do I have that data set right now? Not yet. I will get to it. We are just rolling this next phase out, right? But one of the projects, then, that I have is, I would like to take a look at every person in the talent pool and see where they are, chart it somehow, right? That where they are in their development and those core competencies. And then look at that same… do the same thing again in a couple of years, and hopefully we're gonna see that the percentage of those core competencies are increasing, of what their skills are with that. And then the third one is, again, the talent pool staff are going to serve as trainers. And Joy talked a little bit about that, of how, now, this doesn't mean they have to do a webinar like this, necessarily. They could even just be rolling out a little something at their own internal division meeting with 4 other people. Maybe they do something at our quarterly forum, giving an update of some kind, or talking about a project they're working on. You can really look at this a bunch of different ways. Maybe they're really good at a particular core competency, or duty, or skill, you know, ability, knowledge type piece.

And we have several staff members saying in their survey that they want to learn more about that. Maybe, you know, instead of having a manager lead that we're gonna go to one of our talent pool staff members who can really do that well and say, hey, can you share what you know with the rest of our group here? Because how awesome is it that we have all of this talent right here, and we can just learn from each other, right? Kind of like that old joke of, you know, "mom, can we have McDonald's for dinner tonight?" "No, we have McDonald's at home." Like, we have that staff here in the off… we have people that can teach at. We don't have to go somewhere to do that, right? So that's how we kind of… I just kind of took that a little step further, and I wanted you to be able to see how you can choose your goals and choose your metrics in a very, very simple way, just to get yourselves going and to learn the process and how to implement it. And then you can go discuss deeper. This is not the world's deepest, most challenging goal setting and metrics, right? But it's a little bit deeper than it was 3 years ago, and that's really where I want you guys to come with me and see. So, we did send out a staff survey again, we updated it. As you can see, this time we have included the core competencies, and we asked the same question where we said in the next year, and then we said the exact same thing, but in 3 years and in 5 years. So we're asking them, "what are your future plans? What are you thinking? What do you think you need for that?" And then seeing if they themselves can pick these domain areas of the core competencies where they feel they themselves want a little bit more work. And now I have created and put together this more formalized action plan that we're hoping we can utilize and roll out in this next phase of succession planning.

So you're, top area, where it says Top Developmental Areas, that is probably literally going to be a core competency, and it needs to be supported from the review process or other documentation that you have, so, it's very important that the current manager or supervisor of your talent pool employee is… they're the person who's probably going to be putting this together, maybe with some help and guidance from their manager or your health commissioner or director. And again, then if you look at that bottom part, you're going to see that it's broken into these increments of 1 year, 3 year, 5 years, so we really want to look at how are we developing in the big picture. Even if 3 to 5 years is longer than the succession plan, you're going to be able to start seeing this trajectory and where we want this growth to go.

And then, I also want you to see, you can see on the top, it does label key positions, so… so this action plan is for the individual employee, and you're going to put if there's a particular key position or key positions that they are in the talent pool, on the bench for. But you know what? They may not. There may not be a specific one, and that's okay, too. Again, these things are not set in stone, but that can help really organize it if they are somebody that you're thinking, this very specific position could potentially be a fit for them.

So again, this is just looking at that second side of that action plan, where you can see how that is going to be the same thing, but in 1 to 3 years, and 3 to 5 years. And again, this is another document that we are going to provide for you as well. I want you to also remember, too, that when you do these action plans, you're going to be doing these with the employee. You're not just…I personally recommend that the manager fills it out, thinks through this stuff, has some ideas in mind of where they want to go, talks to the employee about it, but then brings in the employee, and together really formalizes what it's going to be. And it may look different than what that manager first came up with, and that's good. You want that staff member to be a part of it, because it's their… it's their growth and journey as well, right? And that's reiterating back to the whole point of, we're investing in you, we find you valuable. We find you in…we don't want to lose you. We want you here. We want you engaged, and we want to be able to get every last drop of your brilliance out of you to make my organization better, right? Our organization better. And what's gonna best serve my health department? You being better. And again, I really think this all, as well, needs to be discussed at annual reviews. I am a very strong proponent of meeting with a staff member at least monthly on an individual basis, if not more, if necessary, depending on projects that are going in. And when you have those, you know, kind of base-touching meetings always bring this back into it at some point, you know, and that's just one of the things on the list of things to cover when I meet with you once a month. And then, how about your action plan? How's it going? What are we doing on this? You know what? I know that we had this great idea, we're 3 months in, we haven't even started talking about, you know, so when's a good time? Or what's our idea if it's for 12 years? And that sort of thing. And then you can get them on PARP… on… on the same page with you on this.

And essentially, now we've got you doing a little wheel, right? We're just gonna go round and round every couple or three years, replicating this process. Some of our faces are gonna change, some people will leave, some people will come in. When you roll out that first survey, you may have a handful of people who are brand spanking new that shouldn't even be worrying about what they want to do, necessarily, in 3 to 5 years, because they need to, you know, just figure out where the bathroom is right now, and that sort of thing. Read your policies. But…But this can all sort of work together with that, and then you'll find out the new things. So now, when we do… when we did our 2025 staff survey, we could pick the brains of some people that had just come in very green 3 years earlier, and are at a completely different place. And I think that Joy has a little… a little viewpoint on this last little piece to kind of send us off before we maybe have some questions?

ERMIE:
Yeah. So, you know, for those of you who have lived with us for all three sessions, or have watched all three sessions with us, I think that you'll see the value in the recordings, because we know that this is difficult, and we know that it's challenging. But don't wait until you feel very, very comfortable with anything in your life before you start, okay? So, I loved these. You can't learn to drive in a parked car. So, we gotta get rolling, and no matter how scary that is. You've got to try. And don't worry too much about how you're going to get it all done. Just get started and learn as you go, and it will all come to you. Action does create momentum, and momentum energizes you to keep going. And if you have to stop and hit the brakes and repeat something, then do it. Because the last time I checked, nobody is giving us a grade on how well we do succession planning except ourselves. So, nobody's gonna know if you stumbled on the verbiage, nobody's gonna know if you said this instead of that, if you said...And…Just… just do it. You got this, you can do this, you've done hard things, you've done harder things than this, especially in public health, right?

I am going to just make sure that there's nothing, no other, before we go to questions. We talk a lot about the references we use, and these are at the end of everything, so you can always click on everything that we used, and then I know that, this is the QR code for the eval, so I will turn it over to A.C. or someone at ASTHO to kind of, get us into our question and answer, and maybe get the slides down. And then I want to just start with one question.

Well, looky there! I just want to start with one question, I know, but that came over in an earlier session, something to the effect of, "how do you get maybe leadership who's a little hesitant to get going on this?" Go back and watch the first… go back and watch the first session, is my first advice to you. The second thing is there's buzzwords that us administrators like. We like the words efficiency, effectiveness; we like, financial stability. We like, I don't want to waste time, right? I'm busy, I'm busy, I'm busy. Yeah, we're all busy, right? We're all busy. But you know how much busier you're going to be if you don't have succession planning? Because Tiffany, I believe you started the first one with a question of, ask yourself if you can replace your leadership team in, what was it, 30 days? Can you? Because if your administrator, God bless them! If they can say, "yes, I know that if my entire leadership team turned in their resignations today, that I have people who are up to snuff, I have a succession bench, I have talent pool, I know their core competencies, I know this one's great to do this, and this one's better to do that, and I can just plug them in, and in 30 days, it's like nothing ever happened." Then God bless you that your administrator already did succession planning. But doesn't that sound exciting, to know that you could do that? We know there's always going to be hiccups, we know you're not going to fill every position internally. But you're probably not going to have everybody walk out on the same day either. I mean, let's be realistic. So, efficiency, effectiveness, financial solvency. If you're accredited, all you have to say are the words strategic plan, workforce development plan, you know, training money, training costs. And right now, here's a really good one. Is it easier to retain or to recruit? And I'm gonna venture to guess right now in the world, it's easier to retain.

So…how can we keep the people, invest in them? Tiffany, how many times have we said invest in this building over the last 2 years since we started succession planning 3 years ago? So, that's, those are some helpful hints that I hope help.

ROTHENBUECHER:
Thank you so much. So I saw, let's see, a few comments earlier in the presentation, just some folks adding some suggestions or some kind of other ways of thinking about things, so thank you for adding those. Definitely some chat about, kind of, the, the handouts and how to act… and also how to access, slides and recordings, so…It's been popped into the chat again, how to access the, recordings for the last two sessions, which will be the same location for the slides for this session and the recording. We do have the handouts that you've seen throughout. We are going to do some… just some ADA updates to those, documents, and those handouts will be available as soon as possible on the same site.

And then I do… there was a question answered, around… some questions around transcription features that was already answered, in the Q&A function. And then I see a new question, just thanking you all for the series.

ROTHENBUECHER:
And the question is, can you provide any recommendations on how a larger health department of 300 plus FTEs, can implement this? In addition to traditional public health, their department has EMS, social services, Indigent health under HHS.

DAY:
So my first thought… I think there's a couple ways, right? You do this at… real big. Which is how it is absolutely developed to be done, and you get that… your high level, you're going to probably focus initially much higher level in terms of, the leadership positions, and you're probably gonna have a bigger team, because you're going to have more middle management in there, so you're going to want to have some of those voices at the table. However, I think, myself, how I would propose trying it would be to pick one of the departments that I say are your divisions that you think are probably going to have the most buy-in, or the easiest ones to sort of sell, wink wink, on succession planning. And just implement the whole process just within that one department.

I would assume that your department sizes are probably close to the size of a lot of health departments alone, and I think when you get that win with them. Who can then start telling their successes and the benefits of it, and that, you know what, it really…Yeah, it was a monthly meeting, but it wasn't that bad, you know, or whatever. Then you move into, who's my number 2 buy-in department, and I think you… I would be looking at, okay, it's going to be a much longer, because I'm going to be piloting through different departments, and then maybe if it catches on, you can start doing more than one department at a time. And then maybe if you eventually want to go whole hog, I mean, it's absolutely designed for that, you know, it's in the private sector, C-suites and all of that meeting, but personally, that is, I think, the approach I would really consider, and Joy may be able to add something that… that I wouldn't be able to think about, so she may say something differently.

ERMIE:
No, I'd say, like anything else, I think it's easier, you know, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time? That's how I would… I would go. Start with one, get your feet wet, where you're the most comfortable doing it. Maybe the one who has start back in Session 1. Look at your org chart, look at your attrition, look at your, special skills, your retirements here, look at all of those things. And then that goes into another question that we got in the question and answer, is asking us how to go, how to… oop, where is it? How to… how are key positions defined and prioritized? So, I invite you to go… to go back. In Session 2, we walked you through tools, and those resources are there, because you're right, you do need to prioritize them. You can't do them all. It would take a long time to review that, and… but if you… if you go back into Session 2, you absolutely can see how we, how we go through all that, so hopefully that helps.

ROTHENBUECHER:
Thank you. Any other questions, hands up, or chat, or Q&A questions for our presenters?

ERMIE:
And I see that someone said, we're not unionized, so we're not even going to pretend, we don't even play that on TV, so we're just gonna…God bless you.

ROTHENBUECHER:
Any other parting thoughts, other than you can do this, which we heard, really, really loud and clear for you, Joy. Anything else?

ERMIE:
It's really not as difficult as you think. It… it will help you as the administrator. It will help you as the manager. It will help your managers in general see the big picture. We… you can lecture on the big picture all day long, until you're in it, and you're like, "Oh."

For a minute, go back to that slide… we're not going to do it right now, but go back to, in your mind, go back to that slide where Tiffany said we used, Wiseman's 25 best practices, and we came up with 15, and we were all like, wait a minute, we have to do strategic… well, okay, maybe I didn't, but I probably did. Everybody was like, wait a minute, we have strategic goals, we have performance metrics, we have chip priorities, we have chip strategies.

I have my own job, Tiffany. I have this to do, that to do, that to do, that to do. I have quality improvement to do, I have this, I have this training, that training. And now you want me to do 15 more things? And you realize, guys, you're already doing them! Just get credit for it! You're already doing it! This is your, like, kick in the pants to just finish it. You know, how often have you started those training plans and you just haven't finished them? This is what gets you to get past the finish line. Don't underestimate how much of this work you have already done. It's mostly just organizing at this point.

ROTHENBUECHER:
Thank you. You've gotten a lot of kudos in the chat, and how to, your approach of how to make this kind of what's seemingly kind of complex, and making it easy to follow, so, so, thank you for just an excellent presentation. Tiffany, did you have another part?

DAY:
I was just gonna say, I know as somebody that was, you know, listening when Joy talked at one point to the team about what she was just saying was it just felt like…this role, you could almost feel it in the air in the conference room for the management team when she said, you guys, keep it simple. Yeah! Talking about performance measures. So, I mean, like, even beyond succession planning, just take this little hot nugget with you, is that, yeah, you know what? We don't have to have a whole bunch of different goals for all these plans. It is okay if our performance measure is a strategic goal, which is also in the workforce development plan. We don't have...and that's where it was just such a…for… I think you could just…like, almost feel the internal size happening, and I'm like, "really? Really? We can work on that same thing we're working on? Yeah! let's get a metric, you know, and we can do it!" So, that same thing can be applied within the plan, within the plan, within the plan. So, yeah, absolutely.

ERMIE:
And thank you, all of you who've been watching, and for those of you who are watching the recordings, because it's really hard to get a 3-year process down into about 3 hours. So, thank you for your encouragement to us, because, Yeah...

ROTHENBUECHER:
Thank you again.

ERMIE:
...very long.

ROTHENBUECHER:
Yeah, thank you again for joining us for this ASTHO Connect series. Again, check out the website for materials and recordings and handouts, and have a wonderful rest of your week.

Succession Planning for Public Health Agencies: A Three-Part Webinar Series

Succession Planning Part 1 of 3: Building the Case for Succession Planning

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Succession Planning Part 2 of 3: Laying the Groundwork

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Succession Planning Part 3 of 3: Putting the Plan Into Action

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