Formidable challenges await nearly all park and recreation organizations. Competent leadership has never been more critical to the profession as park and recreation organizations compete for scarce resources, attempt to satisfy growing customer expectations and strive to be more influential within the government environment. As public safety has captured the attention of politicians everywhere, park and recreation leaders have had to refine their skills in the public relations arena. The ability to effectively communicate the mission of parks and recreation to a range of audiences is essential for success.

As these difficult challenges loom on the horizon, many veterans of the park and recreation profession are planning their retirement. Individuals who have cultivated deep professional affiliations and long term relationships with local decision makers are preparing to leave the field. Succession planning ensures that key roles will be filled with talented leaders prepared to navigate a clear path forward. Will the next generation be ready for the challenge? The answer is “no” unless park and recreation agencies start building strong leadership skills now. This article will address how park and recreation organizations can manage critical aspects of the succession planning process beyond the use of organization charts to plot who is a candidate for which position.
As current leaders confront the challenge posed by tough, new challenges and wide scale retirements, several questions arise. Which people from existing staff have the capability to be outstanding leaders, not just caretakers? How will the agency pass expertise gained from decades of experience down to the next generation of leaders? How will the agency leverage scarce resources to develop the skills and competencies required to be successful? And how do park and recreation organizations know that they are on the right track, making real progress toward the goal of growing ‘high performance’ leadership talent?

Astute leaders regard existing staff talent as a critical organizational asset. Like any essential asset, staff talent should be managed intelligently. That process begins with a systematic “inventory” of who has what leadership skills and who needs to learn specific new skills going forward. Much too frequently this inventory of skills and competencies is managed informally, casually, and sometimes even haphazardly. Decisions about an individual’s potential and promotions are made, to a large extent, based on impressions. These impressions are often shaded by subjectivity, derived from selective exposure to relevant information.

Valid and reliable information about any one individual’s ‘skill portfolio’ is not easy to get. Performance appraisals, if done well, can help clarify the picture, but rarely do performance evaluations translate into robust professional development plans with behavioral outcomes. Even more rarely is there an organized process to determine who succeeded in learning new skills or competencies as a result of performance feedback. The result, most often, is a widely variable picture of which staff person is proficient at any particular skill and who is not.

Competency models represent a step in the right direction. Competency models, at their best, define how outstanding performers do their job differently from mediocre performers. What is a competency? Think of a top performing individual in your organization. She likely brings a combination of assets to the job: special personality traits, valuable skills and experience. Competencies typically refer to the application of skills and experience to the mastery of an important aspect of a particular job function. For example, resolving conflicts with other municipal agencies requires negotiating skill, but also tact, diplomacy, relationship building skill, charm, etc. Resolving conflicts successfully represents an important competency that can be fostered by training, mentoring and coaching.

Competency models come in all different shapes and sizes. Well designed and implemented successfully, competency models offer the promise of a valuable methodology for defining behaviors that are critical to the successful performance of a particular job role function. Many people however tend to err on the side of being extremely comprehensive and detailed. This approach risks failure if the resulting model is unwieldy and not user friendly. The right balance between detailed descriptions of behavior and user friendliness significantly increases the chances for success. CPRS and Peopleassets have recently developed a competency model for professionals in the field of parks management.

Most competency models draw a distinction between managerial skills and “technical” skills. In the domain of parks leadership, turf management and pest control can be regarded as technical skills. Planning, goal setting and measuring outcomes are managerial skills, responsibility for which parks managers share with many other types of leaders. Typically, as an individual moves up in the organizational hierarchy, he or she relies less on the technical skills that were essential in early career roles and more on the managerial skills and competencies required to be successful in a leadership role as displayed in Diagram 1.

A wide variety of personality and leadership assessment tools are available to evaluate managerial strengths and weaknesses. CPRS and Peopleassets have developed one that is benchmarked on high performing park and recreation leaders and is available on line. The best self-assessment profiles provide useful information about the individual’s leadership strengths, implications of their style and targets for professional development. However, any self-assessment tool needs to be verified by objective sources of data. The now familiar 360º colleague feedback process helps validate the individual’s self-perception and provides candid feedback about the individual’s impact in the organization. This tool is also available to CPRS members on line.

Armed with assessment data from multiple sources, what now? This is where the rubber meets the road. What individuals do with the information about their strengths and weaknesses speaks volumes about their leadership potential.

Some people do very little. Others see it as a special learning opportunity and work diligently to learn new skills and overcome existing weaknesses. Individuals who take advantage of the experience to change patterns of behavior are likely the people to bet on going forward.

Can people really change? The question comes up constantly. Individuals exhibit indicators of a particular temperament in the first few months of life. Personality is forged over decades by cumulative life experiences. Are leadership development programs likely to alter basic personality traits? Not really. However, behavior is another matter. Behaviors are products of personality, temperament, experience and situational determinants. With sufficient reason, motivation and coaching, behaviors can and do change. Individuals who learn new skills, like negotiation tactics, change the way they solve problems. The good news is that a manager’s change of behavior is frequently noticed very quickly. What some may regard as minor modifications of behavior can have a very significant and sometimes even profound impact on the group.

How do organizations effectively develop leader-ship skills of their staff?

First of all, executive managers of the organization must believe in the importance of cultivating leadership skills and act accordingly. The world is full of organizations who proclaim loudly that people are their most important asset, but do not devote adequate time or attention to the issue. Frequently, this trend is not motivated by ill intent. Many organizations devote nearly all available time, energy and resources to immediate problem solving efforts. Simply put, a great many senior level managers are just too busy, or at least they think they are. In reality, they merely postpone the damaging impact of their neglect.

Leaders can communicate the professional development message loud and clear by modeling the process. A park and recreation director who initiates a 360° colleague feedback process to learn about how she “can be the best leader possible” sends a powerful message throughout the organization. Leaders can also initiate efforts in the ‘organizational learning’ domain. Collecting systematic feedback from users of parks and recreation services can stimulate both lively discussion and further inquiry into opportunities for innovative offerings.

Organizational leaders can encourage a commitment on the part of managers and staff to continuously improve skills and competencies. Promotion opportunities can be used to emphasize the importance of mastering new skills. Mentoring and coaching sessions are excellent opportunities to help motivate staff members to expand their skill set. Individuals who make the effort to engage in meaningful professional development activities should be invited to share their experience at staff meetings and discuss the value of their new capabilities to the organization. Recognition is a powerful incentive for others.

The most effective methodology for growing leadership skills and competencies involves creating specific opportunities for staff members to “step up” to a challenge that requires new skills and competencies. This may involve managing a collaborative project with an outside agency or spearheading an innovative program in the community. In such cases, the staff person should be given ample guidance and support throughout the process. Meeting regularly with the selected individual enables senior managers to watch how they think, analyze, plan and problem solve. This kind of project creates an excellent opportunity to gauge their potential for learning.

How do you “transfer” expertise from senior staff people to younger professionals?

Watching a seasoned professional with valued wisdom and a multitude of contacts walk out the door stresses the entire organization by removing high level influence, planning and problem solving skills from the agency. When significant numbers of senior professionals retire, the resulting leadership vacuum can be downright scary. At a time when collaboration, coalitions and alliances are often very high on the list of strategic priorities, losing several highly experienced people can represent a daunting challenge to the organization.

The proven European “apprentice” model offers one example to current managers of park and recreation organizations. Where possible, team a senior professional with a talented and motivated young staff person on specific projects. This creates a supportive learning environment and multiple opportunities to assess the learning capacity of the younger staff person and teach new skills. This approach however is very time intensive and given the multitude of demands on park and recreation agencies, it may be an impractical use of scarce resources.

Park and recreation organizations will have to do a better job of refining ‘best practice’ business processes and managing knowledge in general. For example, what are the factors that must be considered and managed when planning a new park facility? Does the person in charge of that initiative this year have access to the insights and lessons learned from the experience someone else had three years ago? Where does expertise reside in the organization? … in someone’s head or in a common knowledge base easily accessed by any staff person? As large numbers of seasoned veterans prepare to head for retirement, agencies can hardly afford to have that entire body of expertise walk out the door with them.

Succession planning requires management to pay attention to the following critical issues:

1. Clarification of strategic priorities. Understanding the future direction of the organization is essential for defining the leadership competencies required for success.
2. Skill requirements definitions for target positions. Competency models can be extremely useful here.
3. A valid assessment of skills and competencies for current staff. Peopleassets, a CPRS partner, can assist in assessing skills and competencies of your staff.
4. Specific professional development goals defined for staff considered to be candidates for future leadership positions.
5. Robust feedback systems to provide both positive recognition and corrective guidance to staff. These systems give management an opportunity to see how staff members adapt when behavior change is necessary.
6. Vigorous mentoring and coaching processes to support staff in their efforts to build new skills and competencies. Coaching resources can be identified within your agency or from contracted resources outside.
7. Empirical assessment systems to evaluate progress in the development of leadership skills critical to the organization. Real data should drive the assessment of progress toward both individual and organizational goals.

How do organizations know they are on the right track?

Succession planning involves a serious commitment of resources. No one wants to devote that type of resource without knowing if the investment yields the kind of results expected. So how do you know? The entire succession planning process hinges on the articulation of specific professional and leadership development goals. With clear goals stated in behavioral terms, evaluation systems can demonstrate real progress or the lack of it.

Individuals use self-assessment and feedback data to define specific behavioral goals focused on needed leadership competencies. These leadership development goals should be discussed with supervisors to gain their support and to validate their focus. Time frames should be associated with each goal and data gathered to confirm progress toward goal achievement. Data can come from colleagues, customers, staff and department leaders in various formats. Careful attention should be given to process issues in this context as the focus should remain on growth and development more than evaluation of performance.

Defining group development goals can help positively shape the organizational culture. Organizational surveys like the Peopleassets Team Culture Profile track staff opinions on critical organizational dimensions like planning effectiveness, morale, goal clarity, teamwork, conflict resolution success and several other essential aspects of the organizational culture. Like individual efforts, progress on group improvement initiatives can be tracked with systematic feedback data.

Structured leadership development initiatives reveal critical information about potential future leaders. Do they approach the challenge enthusiastically or warily? Do they readily acknowledge that they have a lot to learn or approach the process with an air of complacency? Do they welcome feedback from various sources as a means to gain new insights or try to restrict the feedback process to hearing good news from friendly sources? Do they work diligently on new skill acquisition or attempt to convey that they have all the necessary skills they need?

Conclusion

Succession planning should be approached with same seriousness of purpose that one would bring to the management of any valuable asset. Retirement fund assets are invested in different vehicles depending upon an individual’s appetite for risk. Investment yields are tracked. Investment strategies are modified when results do not meet expectations. Retirement fund managers are kept or fired based on portfolio results. Succession planning efforts should be managed similarly. Create a rigorous structure to collect assessment information, define specific goals, track progress and evaluate results. In this context, the people who should be at the top of your organization in the future will emerge as stars.

If you want to learn more about how CPRS/Peopleassets can assist you in developing your staff and shaping succession plans, please call or email Richard Houston, President, Peopleassets at 415/229-3170 or at rth@att.net

Click here to learn more about the CPRS/Peopleassets Leadership Development