Workforce succession planning helps cultivate leaders, officials say

Agencies with good workforce succession plans that focus on recruiting and nurturing employees will feel little pain from potential retirements, personnel experts told House lawmakers Wednesday.

"Succession planning can help an agency become what it needs to be rather than recreating an existing agency," the General Accounting Office's Chris Mihm testified before a hearing of the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Civil Service and Agency Organization. Mihm is GAO's director of strategic issues.

During the past few years, lawmakers, workforce planning experts and administration officials have pointed to a looming retirement wave, with recent projections estimating that more than 70 percent of the federal workforce will be eligible to retire by 2010. Those projections prompted OPM and other agencies to develop workforce planning strategies. While retirements have not taken place at the rate anticipated, agencies have benefited from the attention they focused on the issue, according to Dan Blair, deputy director of the Office of Personnel Management.

"Credit goes to GAO, [Comptroller General] David Walker and his staff for highlighting the problems," Blair said. "Now, agencies are preparing not only for today, but for today and the future."

To have a good succession plan, agencies must glean what competencies they have now and determine what competencies and skills will be needed in the future to meet the agency's overall mission and goals, Mihm said.

"When we go into agencies and find succession plans that aren't working well, what we find is a focus on individual positions," Mihm explained. "Good succession planning is not just looking at who's next in line for a slot, but looking at people early in their careers and determining what kind of training they need to become leaders."

Under the President's Management Agenda, agencies are graded periodically on their efforts to reform in five areas: e-government, human resources management, financial management, competitive sourcing and linking budgets to performance. Currently, no agency has achieved a "green" rating in human capital management in the traffic light-style grading system. But in the year since the ratings were launched, several agencies have made progress.

"As the expression goes, what gets measured is what gets done," Blair said.

The administration is expected to release the PMA's fiscal 2003 fourth quarter ratings in the next few weeks.