How To Accelerate The Development Of Leadership Potential

With pending retirements and a tightening labour market

, many organizations are embarking on new initiatives to accelerate the growth of their leaders. This article explores how you accelerate leadership potential. How do you accelerate leadership potential? What are the key factors for success?

First, you need to understand what leadership potential is. The Corporate Executive Board conducted research which found that there are three elements to leadership potential: 1) ability; 2) engagement: and 3) aspiration. A persons ability consists of innate characteristics like their ability to process complex ideas and think logically and to perceive and understand peoples emotions. Engagement refers to the extent that the person is committed to their job and the organization. Aspiration simply refers to whether or not someone values the benefits of taking on a leadership role.

Second, you need to define what it means to be a leader in your organization including the required skills, experience and attributes and define what it takes to fit with the team, and culture. Create clearly defined hiring criteria and go beyond traditional job descriptions. Don't just talk about what you need, but make sure you understand what differentiates exceptional versus average performers.

Third, implement disciplined and structured leadership selection practices. There is an old leadership adage that says, Hire slow, fire fast. This simply means take your time hiring the right people, and if you make a mistake quickly cut your losses. If you want to accelerate leadership potential, it is wise to exercise due diligence during the upfront selection process. Design your selection process based on uncovering top candidates, and use a number of reinforcing selection tools to increase the predictive reliability of your process.

Fourth, use leadership assessments as part of your selection process. If you want to really support someone to grow and develop, you need to understand what they do and why do it. You can often get at the what by examining their behaviour, but you can only understand the why through assessments. For example, a leader may struggle with delegating, even though they have taken courses on the subject. The problem does not stem from a lack of technical know how, it usually comes from a thinking pattern that makes it hard to delegate. For example, a leader may be a perfectionist and think, I can do it better myself. Or, a leader may have a high need for approval and think: What if they dont like this task? Either way, using assessments as part of your leadership development process can give you the information you need to coach leaders to break these patterns.

Lastly, focus on 90 day action plans. If you want to accelerate plans, you need to stay on top of developmental assignments. Create assignments for every 90 days and build in periods of action, reflection and re-strategizing. Do this by working closely with an executive coach, and building mechanisms for holding the leader and the executive sponsor in charge of their development accountable for results.

Copyright (c) 2010 Natalie Michael

by: Natalie Michael

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