Developing Your Future Leadership

If you’re serious about promoting from within, you need a plan to develop your people for future opportunities. The practice of choosing the best scientist to manage a group of research scientists or the best sales rep to the position of sales manager is usually setting people up to fail. It’s terribly unfair to the person you’ve just promoted to throw them into a ‘sink or swim’ position. Leadership skills can be taught and can be learned. Giving your high potential employees an opportunity to learn both management and leadership skills prior to being offered a promotion just makes sense.

So how do you this. I believe the first thing you must do is hire people who are motivated by the opportunity to grow and take on more responsibilities. You must recruit and hire people who have the characteristics and the desire for future advancement. Many companies have a checklist of characteristics they look for when interviewing. Many times these characteristics are suggested by current employees. Most often the #1 characteristic current employees say they want in an employee their company hires is a positive attitude. So an applicant who can’t even muster a positive attitude during the interview is automatically cut from the prospect list.

The key to recruiting the type of person that fits your checklist of characteristics requires you to develop good open ended questions that will give you the information about the candidate that you’re looking for. Questions such as ‘what would you like to be doing three years from now?’ Or, ‘tell me about a conflict you had in the past and how did you handle it?’ Open ended questions should encourage the prospect to talk. If the person doesn’t talk, or doesn’t say much when she does, this is most likely a ‘red flag’. If the applicant can’t come up with answers to these questions you probably shouldn’t consider making a job offer.

You should also consider a formal leadership development curriculum. Employees can apply for acceptance to this training. You want to develop those people who want to be developed. Interviewing the employees who apply to determine their worthiness is a must. It’s best to limit membership and bring other employees onto the program as openings occur.  This will give you a continuous pool of high potential employees who have some knowledge of what the next step on the corporate ladder entails. I don’t advocate sending employees to training programs unless you have a detailed understanding of what they will be taught. If you don’t, it is possible the content and direction of the training isn’t aligned with your corporate philosophy. Having your training department or hiring an independent consultant to do the training in house allows you to audit this training and making sure it matches your expectations.

The last and most important aspect of this program is to utilize this pool of people when openings occur. This will give credibility to your leadership program. Obviously there will be some positions where you have to recruit from outside, but these should be few and far between.

A program such as this can be a valuable recruiting tool that certainly will help you attract and retain high quality prospects. Many good companies have recruiting brochures that place a high emphasis on their opportunities for advancement.

If it’s done right, the investment in a program such as this will have a high percent return on your investment in ways far beyond simply having people ready for advancement.

Jim Doyle