Chief Learning Officer - March 2008 - (Page 46)

productivity in practice: Succession Planning Tips from the U.S. GAO Carol Willett Regardless of position or title, we all eventually move on. Unless you intend to stay in one job in one place for your entire career, you need to think about how to transition what you do and what you know to someone else. There is no better exit strategy than preparing others to take over for you when you choose to leave. To help staff at the U.S. Government Accountability Office more effectively share their knowledge, experience and network of contacts, the Learning Center offers these suggestions as part of personal succession planning. • Write your own position description that captures the key knowledge, skills and contacts you acquired in carrying out your job. • Develop a one-year calendar that lays out predictable crises or key events that arise time and again. • Create an annotated Rolodex of your key network of contacts. Include information on who your contacts are, why they are significant to the work you do and the nature of the relationship. Include both internal and external contacts. • Keep a notebook on lessons learned. At the end of an activity or a program, jot down what you hoped would happen, what actually happened and what you learned from the process. • Start a file on tips and tricks. Describe what you wish someone had explained or demonstrated to you rather than having to learn it the hard way. • Offer to mentor others in performing your kind of work. • Diagram simple decision trees to capture the tacit process you use in making choices on the job. Drawing the if-then choices helps to clarify your thought processes. • Invite others to shadow you on some aspect of the job. Make time to explain the dynamics involved and to answer questions they may have. • Start a wiki and invite others in the unit to share information that will broaden everyone’s understanding of what the work requires. • Organize a community of practice with others who engage in the same kind of work you do or who share the same challenges and issues. • Create job aids that will help your successor do your job. • When you work with others on the job, make an effort to state your assumptions and to explain your thought processes. • Offer to serve as a subject matter expert in helping the learning department to develop courses or performance support tools related to your job. • Capture critical knowledge in key documents and leave a wellmarked map on how to find them. • Make notes about what you wish you had known that can help someone else more rapidly ascend the learning curve. • Draft a loose-ends checklist that describes initiatives, programs or work that remains to be done. Carol Willett is the chief learning officer at U.S. GAO. She can be reached at editor@clomedia.com. March 2008 such a way that what you’ve built continues to grow and be properly resourced in the future. We can all be hit by a bus. We don’t like to think about that, but it’s true. If we’re not documenting what we do, how we do it, why we do it and the tradeoffs necessary to make decisions, we’re not doing our organization any favors. Preparation needs to begin as you take over and build, systematize growth and facilitate meaningful change. You’ve got to capture what you’re doing as you go along.” One final aspect of succession is CLOs preparing themselves to let go of a role they dedicated so much time and energy to. Willett maintains this won’t be too much of a problem for her, as she’s never put all of her eggs in one basket when it comes to work. “I’ve never had just one job,” she said. “I’ve always done multiple things. I’ve had a job and been an adjunct professor at a college or co-authored books or designed houses. There are a lot of pieces to my life, and I’m not defined by a particular job.” Additionally, she keeps a picture of her beach house on North Carolina’s Outer Banks in her office to remind herself what she has waiting for her when she leaves GAO. “I’ve got this beach that really needs combing, and I aspire for it to be the best-combed beach on the Atlantic seaboard. I would like to take six months to comb that beach, listen to what the universe tells me and see what I’m called to do next.” After It’s been about a year since David Vance left his position as president of Caterpillar University. Although he is currently a self-employed consultant, he’s spent a lot of time in recent months exploring the great outdoors surrounding his new home in the foothills of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. Vance looks back on his six years with his former employer fondly and acknowledges that it wasn’t easy to leave it all behind. “I really enjoyed the job, enjoyed the people and was proud of everything we’d done,” he said of his days at Caterpillar University. “In that respect, it was hard. If you talk to a lot of people who are retired, they’ll probably tell you that they miss the people they work with and miss the good challenges and the work they had an opportunity to do. That would be true for me as well.” Still, Vance is happy with the way things turned out, both in terms of what he left behind and the person who ended up taking over for him. (Like Willett, he was not able to handpick an heir apparent.) “They searched around and came up with someone who was actually in the same human services group I was in,” he said. “He was an excellent candidate, and in our case, he had responsibility for the other functions we wanted to merge into the corporate university anyway. That was fortuitous. He already had succession management, workforce planning and organizational development (skills). Beyond that, he also had managed the predecessor organization to Caterpillar University, when it was a smaller training group.” I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer 46 http://www.clomedia.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Chief Learning Officer - March 2008

Chief Learning Officer - March 2008 Editor's Letter Table of Contents Imperatives Selling Up, Selling Down Strategies Take Five Learning Solutions The Treasury Board of Saskatchewan: Training the Trainers With Experiential Learning Clo Profile Environment Xerox: Creating a Learning Masterpiece Tactics Capturing the Knowledge of the Workforce Productivity Succession Planning Tips from the U.S. GAO Human Capital Influencing Competency Management Case Study Case Study Business Intelligence Advertisers' Index Editorial Resources In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - March 2008

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