Welcome to Manager Tools. Today's topic, Bence Evaluation, Chapter 1,

probing. Here we go. We've had a lot of folks over the years asks about interacting with their bench.

How do they do that?

And once you tell folks what their bench is, because maybe we're confusing some new listeners.

Yeah, so good, good. So what most managers do when they have an opening is they think,

okay, I got to fill my opening, right? They have 10 slots on their team as an example,

and somebody leaves.

And then suddenly they have to fill an opening.

And there's really no thinking about having an opening when

everybody's there because you're busy, right? You got 10 people, you got 10 people

to manage and so you're good. You're retaining people and that's good, there's work to be done.

And because it's hard work to fill an opening, you don't think about filling the opening until you have one.

Manager Tools managers, managers though know that the problem with that is that if your opening happens,

you start filling it at that time when it becomes open, it takes you 60, 90 days.

And you ought to be finding people to fill future holes on your team now.

And we call the colleagues, the associates,

potentially the friends who are high performers

or good performers that you could see yourself working with in some fashion in the future.

We call those people your bench.

People who are ready to fill an opening for you that comes up.

If you have to fill an opening when you lose someone, it's inherently

a bad process. And we hope openings are rare. We hope you keep people and they don't leave. they're going to right you're going to

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