Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to the ASAP vlog series. My name is Chrissy Savick. I'm a career coach and a corporate trainer and I'm also a very proud former administrative professional. Today I'm going to share with you some insights regarding succession planning for administrative professionals. First, let's define what succession planning actually is. It's the process of identifying and developing talent for the purpose of replacing an individual in a key role. Often we hear executive level leaders talking about succession planning, but it's much less common for administrative professionals, which to me seems really odd because many admins hold positions that are indeed key roles. If and when they leave, their departure could cause major disruption to a team and organization. Succession planning helps to prevent that. So this is the primary benefit. It helps to set your team and organization up for success and eases your transition in the future. It's all about minimizing disruption if and when you move to another opportunity. Ultimately, it helps reduce your stress in the transition process and helps you maintain your strong professional reputation. If you've ever left a job and you felt like you were leaving people in a lurch and they were really going to struggle to fill your shoes, you know how difficult that can be on you and on the people you leave behind. So succession planning allows you to do things now to prevent that pain later on. I realize that you may be watching this and you might be asking yourself, why should I worry about succession planning? I'm not planning on changing jobs anytime soon. I'm not looking to transfer or get a promotion in the near future. So why should I bother? The answer is simple. You never know what the future holds. Tomorrow you may be approached with a fantastic opportunity that you're not even aware of today. Your significant other might get transferred to another state and you'll have to find a new job there. You may suddenly decide to take a different career path or go back to school or travel the world. You might get sick and have no other choice but to take some time off of work. You just never know when it may be time to move on. So there are some things you can do now to plan for your future departure if and when that time comes. And don't worry, these are not things that are going to send up red flags to your boss and suggest that you have one foot out the door. In fact, your boss is probably going to see these things as beneficial. The first thing you can do now is ensure you have a current and accurate job description. Perhaps your role has evolved since your job description was first created or maybe you never had a complete job description to begin with. That's really common too. Whatever the situation, it's worth spending some time putting together a clear concrete outline of your duties and responsibilities as they stand today. You may need to continually adjust it if your role is changing frequently. The idea is that should your organization need to replace you in a hurry, you want it to be easy for them to see exactly what you do. Secondly, create an inventory of critical skill sets. While your job description is a list of duties and responsibilities, this is a list of specific skills you believe are necessary to do your job well. You are in the best position to know this. Someone on the outside might have no idea what it takes to successfully complete the tasks on your plate each day. Do you need advanced Excel skills or are basic skills enough to do what you do? Do you need exceptional decision-making capabilities, project management skills, or writing abilities? What type of person is most likely to be successful working with the person or the people you support? Keep a running list of things and capture them as they come to mind. This will be a really useful tool to hand over if and when your company is hiring for your replacement. Next, you should create and maintain accurate procedural documentation including checklists, templates, and step-by-step instructions for completing tasks. I realize this is a very time-consuming project and I'm not suggesting that you should have it completely done overnight. In most cases this is going to be an ongoing effort that takes months if not years to complete, so obviously it's not something you want to try to be doing during a two-week notice period. That being said, start with the most critical tasks, that way if you're not available for any reason someone with minimal knowledge can come in and make sure those tasks get completed. This is so helpful for the person who will fill your shoes one day and it's also really helpful for those who might fill in temporarily due to things like illness and vacations. Next, identify and mentor prospective successors. Look around you and see who you think possesses the skills and abilities necessary to fill your shoes or who has the potential to. They don't necessarily have to be the perfect fit right now. If you think the person might have the right personality, work ethic, and character, the skills can be taught. That is what mentorship is for. Now I want to be really clear here that you don't have to articulate out loud to the person or really to anyone that you've identified them as a prospective successor. You can simply inwardly identify people who might be a fit in the future. Find out their career aspirations and offer them mentorship that could apply to their next steps, whether that means filling your role in the future or filling another role. Lastly, you may want to consider cross-training some of your current team members on critical tasks. We talked about it earlier that procedures can be really helpful but there's nothing like hands-on experience. Many organizations encourage cross-training to minimize risk and also just to get more eyes on important things. For example, maybe if you show someone else on your team the process you use for calendar management, they'll be able to offer an improvement that you couldn't see. Cross-training is also helpful for workload management. If you're the only one who knows how to do something, people can't help you when you're overloaded. But if others are already trained, you can call them in for support when needed. Plus, cross-training allows others to experience more professional development and growth on the job, which is a key driver in engagement and job satisfaction. Hopefully you can see that there's no reason not to get started with succession planning today. By implementing these five simple steps, you can set yourself, your team, and your organization up for success now and in the future, no matter what happens. Once again, I'm Krissy Sivek presenting on behalf of the American Society of Administrative Professionals. Thank you so much for watching.