Michigan cooperatives met in Grand Rapids last week for our Annual Symposium. Attendees were challenged by several headline speakers who offered interesting viewpoints on the changing economy and workforce, upcoming political races, new trends in power markets and the role of distributed resources, and supply chain challenges. Common themes of dramatic change and uncertainty permeated each presentation.

For the past six months, the Wolverine Board and I have been discussing a similar theme of uncertainty – how do we prepare for upcoming retirements of half of the Wolverine Senior Team? I’m proud of this senior team – their diligence, care, creativity, and problem-solving skills make them effective and fun to work with. The easiest thing for me to do is nothing – work with this great group and let the remaining half and the Board figure out what to do after we’re gone!

Wolverine built its success over the past 25 years from the habit of looking forward, thinking long term, and leveraging the patient support of its Board and members. We believe we can apply this same approach to our succession plan. Instead of waiting for the problem to land in our lap, we can make smaller changes now to prepare the leaders of Wolverine’s future. Last week we announced the addition of Casey Clark to our leadership team, and today I am excited to announce the next set of changes.

Jon Johnson will join the senior team as our new VP – Engineering & Technical Services. He will lead our dedicated group of engineers and CAD employees and their important contributions to our Five-Year Work Plan. In addition, he will be the senior leader of the Technical Services field crews.

Tim Martin will move to VP – Fiber Operations. In addition to carrying on some of his past responsibilities, Tim’s primary focus will be Wolverine’s emerging fiber optic business deployment. I need a dedicated senior leader who can integrate the needs of the Wolverine members, Board, and consultants and ensure we manage necessary resources to achieve a successful launch of what could prove to be an important and lucrative long-term business for Wolverine. Dan Calverley will take over as VP – Generation & Operations and will continue his oversight of the generation crews in addition to the line operations department.

Managing change can feel awkward and inefficient at first. In the long run, Wolverine will create more capable leaders conditioned to decision-making amidst the inevitable uncertainty of our changing business landscape. I’m proud to work for an organization and Board that embraces a long-term view and gives us the resources to implement investments today that create benefits for tomorrow.