Managing the gap: as baby boomers retire, legislative staff managers are cultivating the next crop of leaders.

• Author: Weberg, Brian
• Position: Staff

It was like the canary in the coal mine.

When two senior members of the fiscal staff announced their retirement to the Nevada Legislative Counsel Bureau in 2009, Tammy Grace, deputy director of the bureau, knew it would grab lawmakers' attention and help them recognize the serious problem facing them.

"The loss of long-term employees left a gap in institutional knowledge for our agency in an area that has a direct relationship to our legislators," Grace says. "It made the turnover problem very visible."

Plenty of staff have left since, Grace says. Some retired, while others took outside offers, perhaps made more attractive by furloughs, pay cuts and reduced benefits. Then came the biggest blow. Before the 2011 session, the bureau's 18-year director, Lorne Malkiewich, announced he would retire at the end of the session.

The much-anticipated, much-discussed baby boomer exodus appears to be in full swing at the Nevada legislative bureau. Even before Malkiewich's announcement, however, the staff agency was developing a way to deal with the problem. After the high-profile departures in 2009, Tammy Grace worked with members of the bureau to design a leadership academy where participants would gain the skills to be good managers and leaders who are willing to share what they learn with their younger coworkers. With support from legislative leaders, who felt the loss of key budget talent, the program was awarded $40,000 in 2011 to fund its startup.

Looking Down the Road

The Nevada Legislature has been ahead of the pack in addressing upcoming staff needs. The process of identifying gaps between future workforce needs and current capacity and then developing programs to close those gaps is officially called "succession planning." It usually is a collaborative endeavor among an organization's leaders (staff and legislators), human resources professionals and employees. Plans may include designing new positions, reassigning job responsibilities, reorganizing agencies, investing in staff training, improving recruitment activities, focusing on retention, preserving the knowledge of senior staff, and finding ways for those soon to retire to mentor their younger colleagues.

Like legislatures, most public organizations and many private ones have no succession plan in place or, at best, have only bits and pieces of various activities to help manage upcoming transitions. Few legislatures have performed serious "gap analyses" to identify how their current...