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Succession Planning

JEA: Succession Planning to Avoid a Talent Crisis

Kellye Whitney

As with many organizations concerned about large numbers of potential retirees who conceivably could leave at any time, JEA has stepped up its succession planning activities. The knowledge drain that would occur if key positions opened without clear successors to pick up the reins has spurred the municipal utility serving Jacksonville and other areas in northwest Florida into what Greg Lynn, JEA manager of performance management, calls pre-crisis mode.

“Some 35 percent of our employees could leave any day,” Lynn said. “You have to have enough people in the pipeline training so that these journeymen, the line maintainers who actually go out and build and maintain our transmission and distribution systems, for example, are capable of delivering our service. If key people walked out now, my opinion is we would do some floundering to get the right people to cover those bases.”

Robert Growcock, JEA director of organizational performance, said the utility industry tends to have an older workforce than many others. Plus, JEA went through quite a few years of not hiring replacement employees as the company drove efficiency into the organization.

Succession planning helps to ensure knowledge transfer occurs from the older generation of employees to the new generation that will be taking over soon.

JEA has plants that are 30 years old, and existing workers can navigate the older legacy systems that many utility companies still use, Growcock explained.

“Recently, we looked at every single management position throughout the organization and identified areas critical for us to ensure there is a successor in place,” he said. “First, we talked to all the different areas and asked them, ‘Which jobs are critical, where you only have a small number of people filling those positions or don’t have an identified successor?’ Second, ‘If we were to lose that position, and it took us awhile to fill it, would it stop any of our critical systems from running?’ From that, we identified both management positions and critical nonmanagement positions at risk, and we’re working on a plan to make sure those positions have enough coverage and we have a successor identified.”

For instance, some of JEA’s key engineers are responsible for reporting relationships with regulating authorities for the utility industry. If those people left without an informed successor, the base knowledge of different legalities and reporting requirements required on a monthly or greater basis would leave, as well.

“Another of the critical positions is manager of bulk power operations, basically, the person responsible for dispatching our electrical generation units,” Growcock said. “What he does is based on current market conditions — what would it cost us to purchase energy on the market versus generate our own electricity here with some of our own electrical generation plants? On a daily and even an hourly basis, he makes the decision on what time they come online, which units to start up, whether we purchase power that day or make it internally, and he puts together a plan for how we dispatch our electrical generation units.

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