Bench depth is just as valuable to business organizations as it is to sports teams. Just ask the senior management at the Charleston (S.C.) Water System.The management team saw several years ago that they had a silent problem: a lack of qualified people to replace older workers headed toward retirement. “We faced the loss of about one-third of our employees to retirement within five years,” says Jim Meeks, assistant director of human resources. “So we started benchmarking ourselves against other utilities. We found that many organizations develop succession plans, and that’s as far as they get — there’s no execution.”Determined
