At my very first job in journalism, the managing editor said to me on my first day on the job, "I only hire people who aspire to take my job away from me. Only insecure people don't take succession planning into consideration when they're hiring people."
Of course, this is the same man who, on his last day on the job before moving across the country to head up a larger newspaper, said to his employees, "Sure, some of you probably hated me and can't wait for me to leave, so I'll leave you with this: it can always get worse." But I digress.
As I've learned since then, it's not just insecure people who won't hire an ambitious person who aspires to take one's job someday — it's also people who are too bogged down in the day-to-day to be thinking ahead, for example.
But it can also be someone who is so focused on getting the best person for the job — the job that needs to be filled TODAY — rather than thinking about whether this person might eventually be a candidate to fill one's own shoes when the time comes.
And that, apparently, is causing a real problem for credit unions that want to promote from within when their CEOs leave. In this edition's special report, Credit Union Journal talked with a number of human resources experts about what they see as the biggest challenges credit unions face when it comes to recruitment, retention and training.
The assignment started out as a fishing expedition: call some HR experts and ask each one to name his or her top three to five challenges. But as the responses came in, a pattern began to emerge.
The good news is that credit unions are doing a terrific job of hiring the best people to populate their c suites — excellent chief financial officers, fabulous chief lending officers and wonderful chief operations officers. They're also getting really creative about new, untraditional c-level positions, such as chief culture officers.
But the more special c-level positions a credit union creates, the more specialized the individual officers become — and not all specialists are cut out to become generalists, which is, after all, what a CEO needs to be.
Oddly enough, Instead of the old "too many chiefs, not enough Indians," it's a matter of "too many masters, not enough jacks."
Editor in Chief Lisa Freeman can be reached at lisa.freeman@sourcemedia.com.
