Speaker 1: So the most frequent question we get when I do workshops around the country is, where do I start? As I said, succession planning can be a really intimidating process, but again it doesn't have to if you have the right resources and you have a structured process. The best place to start is to essentially get getting key stakeholders in a room and discussing where to focus those resources and where our most immediate needs are. We do this with a great tool and it's a very long name, our Critical Role Identification Questionnaire, and it's a great tool to basically list the positions that you need succession for and really focusing on which ones are the most important. Identifying those critical roles, we use a relatively simple questionnaire and essentially to use this you would list all the important positions that you need to have successors for. Many find it really easy to list their management team, specifically senior managers, but I would challenge you to always include a non-manager role at your organization. Every organization has that individual that's super critical to the day-to-day business operations. They may not necessarily be in a senior management role, so challenge yourself. If you don't have one of those individuals listed, you're probably missing out on someone. Next you would, once we've listed those positions, we have our succession management team or our senior management team essentially rate the relative importance of each of those areas and essentially they're along five different areas. So how urgent is the need? The urgency of the need is simply, is the individual expected to be leaving either through retirement, moving into another role sometime soon? So if the need is urgent, that would be a high rating. Secondly, what does the external candidate availability look like? So could we replace this person with someone outside the company relatively soon? Are we aware of someone at one of our competitors, someone in a similar role maybe at an organization in the city that we're in? So what does that external candidate availability look like? Next would be the internal candidate availability. So how many people within the organization would be in a position to move into this role today? And we would rate that. Next, and this should be an obvious one, is the impact that they have on business operations. So I always say to people, think of the position that you need a succession plan for and think of the incumbent. If they were to leave today, which individual would have the largest impact on your day-to-day business operations? And finally, every organization has someone with a relatively unique skill set that may be very unique to not only the industry, but the organization. So understand where, or if you have one of those individuals at the organization, and those people tend to be very difficult to replace. For example, we have an IT team at Sigma, and one of our IT individuals, our senior IT person, been with the company for 25 plus years. Not only is he a very senior technology developer, but he also has a great deal of experience in psychometric testing, which is one of our core competencies. So you can imagine that combination would be very difficult to find. And so we would go through that process, and the really important piece is not so much the ratings are important, but the important piece of this process is actually the discussions that you have with the management team. So where do we agree? Where do we disagree? And I think out of those discussions, which you end up with hopefully a very clear picture with, you'll have a very clear picture of maybe three to five positions that are very critical to the organization that we need to do something about now. The challenge with that though is if you've never done a succession plan before, the easy trap is getting excited about it, and we need to have a succession plan for all these positions. We always tell organizations to start with one role, and this was where the focus comes. Start with a singular focus, make sure that we can demonstrate and communicate success, and then look to expand that with the rest of the organization. And I think focusing on those early successes can give us an opportunity to gain credibility for the process, and also communicating that I think can really get the buy-in from the rest of the organization.