November 20, 2018: Food for thought
I highly recommend small and medium businesses (SMBs) rotate employees through key roles, for both resilience and talent development. Over the past decade, I’ve evaluated the leadership of businesses across industries at different stages through my oversight of business reorganizations and analysis of risk ratings of loan portfolios and management. The data I’ve seen clearly shows developing a bench is equally as important to growth as it is to sustainability and resilience. This practice of rotating key employees has been known as part of the internal control environment within the financial services industry and can prepare an organization for a business interruption in the form of a disaster or disruption of personnel or resources. For SMBs, it can go further and is crucial in preparing to succeed and maintain an optimum level of service and effectiveness regardless of which of your key employees is available.
While size calls for more employees to wear multiple hats, especially in the first few years, there are those subject matter experts who create value primarily in a specific task and seldom deviate. The principals provide limited oversight because of the immediate concerns of keeping the trains running on time. Having limited resources is the reason to create and sustain a deep bench with the capacity to function in all the key roles of the business. While it may be difficult to maintain the level of expertise as the subject matter expert, having an understanding and scope of what they do will enable the principal and team members to fill the void and bring any staffing agency personnel up to speed quicker to minimize business disruption. Rotating key employees enables synergy providing team members the tangible understanding and perspective of why and how their role relates to other parts of the business.
Rotating key employees goes beyond the 2 weeks absence policy and further to be used as a talent identification and development. Having the expert train another employee and the principals in a key task is a way to deepen knowledge and create tangible written guidance which can be referred to and utilized to sustain and grow operations. Having a fresh perspective to carry out a task can identify new competencies as well as update procedures to incorporate new technologies and eliminate outdated and unnecessary redundancies.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Tayo A. Agboke, MPA | Enterprise Risk Management Consultant