Planning To Succeed

There are thousands of books, documentaries, and podcasts dedicated to distilling exactly which components make a great leader. Does it depend entirely on how the leader came to be? The trials and tribulations they overcame? The goals they achieved during their tenure?

When considering the legacy of a leader, have you ever stopped to think that how a leader leaves their post might be as important as how they came into it?

Whether you’ve recently stepped into a leadership role in your agency or you’ve been at the helm for a while, it’s time to start thinking about your replacement. You didn’t achieve this goal by accident—you spent years (if not decades) developing your skills and working hard—and the end of your administration should be met with similar energy and attention. 

Familiar hurdles

When Adam Heinz, Chief Operating Officer at REMSA Health in Reno, Nevada (USA), talks about succession planning, his enthusiasm for the topic shines through.

“Leadership replacements shouldn’t be a surprise,” Heinz said. “Some common barriers can include resistance to change, a lack of buy-in, or selecting a less popular team member for a role.”

To combat that, he recommends early identification of roles that will need to be filled, a comprehensive assessment of what the job roles require, providing developmental opportunities for promising employees, transparent communication, and continuous evaluation to make sure your agency is on the path it wants to be on.

Document everything

“A lot of people talk about succession planning, but they don’t document,” said Jim Lake, Director of Charleston County Consolidated Emergency Communications Center in Charleston, South Carolina (USA). “And if they do document, they don’t share it. After I shared my own succession plan with my boss, we gave it to the staff. We gave them a list of all the meetings we attend, all the things we do, my goals.”

Lake has been preparing his staff since May 2021 when he first announced that he intended to retire in 2026. In addition to documenting all the small things he does every day, Lake’s transparency about the things he wants to accomplish will make sure that the important work that needs to get done is intentional and reproduceable after he’s walked out the door.

“I have been in situations where past leaders I took over for did not share their jobs,” said John Jokantas, 911 Director of Hancock County 911 Center (Greenfield, Indiana, USA). “They didn’t share their duties. Don’t be afraid you’ll be replaced by the person you’re sharing skills with. If I’ve given my people enough knowledge to go be a deputy director somewhere else, how does that not make my career successful?”

Jokantas started officially planning for his 2028 retirement in early 2024, utilizing a high-potential (HiPo) development plan and creating a deputy director position that his colleague Greg Shamblin ultimately filled. They work closely together, Jokantas sharing insight into the tasks he does every day. One of those small tasks is going around the county’s courthouse, getting up on a ladder, and pressing a button on the cameras when the GFI receptacle pops.

“It’s small, but it’s little things that will get lost if they aren’t passed on,” Shamblin said. Your agency might have an organizational chart showing who is in what role and who they report to, but do you have a similar chart for who is slated to take over those roles when the person in them leaves? Heinz highly recommends it as part of your organization’s transparency in communication policy. REMSA Health has future aspirations to display a chart showing who is currently in each of the leadership roles, their retirement dates, and who is on deck to take their place. This level of transparency can decrease resentment or the appearance of favoritism when someone takes over a role because everyone will be watching the hard work the replacement puts in to develop their skills to live up to their predecessor.

Developing your employees

Another principle of succession planning that Heinz highlights is that sometimes you don’t need to find the right person for the role—you can create them. Taking the time to develop your Emergency Dispatchers by playing to their strengths and interests is a great way to show that your agency rewards growth while also filling a potential performance gap.

“I still do our first day for every employee,” Shamblin said. “On their very first day we talk about succession planning. We go through a PowerPoint presentation, and there’s a slide for available training and certifications. If they have an interest or expertise they want to build on, we want them to tell us so we can help plan their future.”

For example, one of their employees wanted to use their degree in marketing and sat down with agency leaders to create a Public Information Officer (PIO) position. They’ve also created a new hire mentor position that is designed to support brand new Emergency Dispatchers in those crucial early days. A training development manager position was created to reconfigure Hancock County’s classroom. In all of these scenarios, the leadership team was able to draw on skills and abilities that were already available to create a resource that didn’t previously exist or improve on one that needed updating.

Hancock County also reimburses Emergency Dispatchers who get their Emergency Number Professional (ENP) certification from the National Emergency Number Association (NENA), and five of their 27 current employees have this impressive distinction.

“We were the first agency in North America to receive NENA’s PIER award,” Jokantas said, referring to the distinction NENA gives to 911 agencies for excellence in training. “They saw what we were doing at our center and wanted to encourage other centers to do similar things.”

Positive side effects

No one wants to imagine themselves having an unexpected illness or accident that takes them out of the agency for a long stretch, but in planning for your successor, you’re also creating a contingency in case the worst does happen.

When Jokantas needed surgery and couldn’t make it to a budgetary hearing, he asked Shamblin to step in for him and had “zero concerns” because Shamblin had watched him prepare and present at similar meetings and knew what to do.

In addition to making transfers of power as smooth as possible, creating a culture of transparency and growth in your center attracts high-quality employees. Hancock County recently had a success story where someone from a neighboring county approached them for a job and was straightforward about their intention to use their time with them to grow. “In their first interview, they said, ‘I know you train a lot here. I want to be a director, and this is the place for me to learn how to do that,’” Jokantas said. “My definition of success for my team does not always end in this building. It ends with them working with our vendors or as directors somewhere else. That means we’re doing something right. We want people to use their talents to be successful, whether it's here or elsewhere.”

Advice for all

Aspiring readers should practice these skills whether or not they’ve got the title they’re working toward. New leaders should take a moment to celebrate how far they’ve come, then start implementing policies that encourage transparency and clear communication. And if any leaders near the end of their tenure are reading this and panicking that it’s too late, it’s never too late! Even if you implement one or two of these policies, your agency will be that much better off because of you.

“Good succession planning starts with your own values,” Shamblin said. “We have to value our team, their growth, our departments, and the industry as a whole. None of us are going to be around forever and this is how you leave the industry better than you found it."