🎧 Listen (4 min)
Succession planning mitigates risk, optimizes resources, engages employees, and improves innovation and performance. Building your next generation of leaders is contingent upon retaining your employees. Getting them involved in a leadership pipeline early on will keep them engaged and challenged. While some of these tips might be more geared toward HR, leaders have responsibility here too and should be taking a forward-thinking role in this.
Current leaders struggle to identify future leaders because the competencies look different than what has worked well in the past. What’s your organizational strategy and what leadership competencies will help achieve that strategy? Create one clear definition of what it means to have future leadership potential in your organization and communicate this within the organization. When you don’t do this, leaders tend to look for people who remind them of themselves and other leaders (affinity bias).
Don’t assume people want to move up into people manager roles. Decide how you are going to look for ability, aspiration, and learning agility. Provide people with dual career ladder options instead of pushing the people into people management positions who don’t want to be there. Someone might be a high-performer and have the ability and learning agility, but no aspiration. The aspiration is needed for your future leaders – how will you look for it and how will you make sure that it’s genuine…that they don’t feel pressured into saying they want to be a leader?
It’s become common that younger people don’t want to take on leadership roles. They also haven’t witnessed the best examples of leadership. Tell people what “leadership” means, what it looks like, and what support they will receive. If you historically promoted people into leadership positions without providing training or support, consider how this looks to others. If they know they won’t receive training or support, they are less likely to want to move up. Help them succeed. Alternatively, let them know it’s okay if they don’t want to take on a people manager role and try to provide other options.
Analyze what is working well and what isn’t working well for leaders in the organization. What gaps are you noticing? How are those gaps affecting organizational effectiveness? What are employees complaining about? How can you close those gaps?
What levels of support are you willing to provide your high-potentials who are interested in advancing (particularly into leadership roles)? How far out are you willing to get them ready for the roles? Clearly define this as much as you can.
It’s highly possible that people may not have had the chance to exhibit their potential or visibility to do so (especially in hybrid/remote work environments). In order to gauge future potential, ask your employees situational, hypothetical questions to understand how they would react and apply their knowledge and skills in a situation they may encounter in the future. This will help you understand how they think and what levels of support they need to be successful.
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