Blog Posts

By Dr. Scott.

If you are familiar with this blog, or if you had the unfortunate experience to be one of my students, you know that I rank effective succession planning as the most important best practices businesses need to implement if long term success is the goal.

Most organizations have a succession plan.  The plan is a written document that identifies individuals and processes for preparing those individuals for future leadership.  Unfortunately, many leadership teams do not have the capacity or the focus to drive this forward long term.  They have a plan, but not the follow through. 

In a broader sense, we often think of all of this as the leadership pipeline.  However, we can already see how this tends to breakdown and how this pipeline easily gets clogged and malfunctions.  When this development process breaks down, it can have a negative impact on organizational culture, business performance, and market share. 

Over the next few weeks, then, we’ll take a look at different elements impacting the leadership pipeline and we’ll begin with identifying leadership potential and how leadership potential factors in to the leadership pipeline.  This week, we’ll look at identifying leadership potential in ourselves, identifying leadership potential in others, and developing leadership potential.

Personal Potential

We know that being an effective leader means constantly improving in key areas to be even more effective and impactful.  As leaders, we can apply the word “potential” to ourselves in several beneficial ways.  For example, reflecting on potential allows us to identify opportunity for personal leadership development.

We begin with statements that include potential and that can lead us to skills enhancement, such “if I focused on listening more, I could potentially increase innovation in my team.”  Statements such as these can unlock leadership potential.

We can also ask ourselves questions relating to potential, such as “what are the potential benefits of focusing on listening longer and speaking last?”

Always looking for ways to improve our own, personal leadership potential inspires others, gives us insights into our own leadership strengths and weaknesses, and enhances our ability to identify leadership potential in others.

Identifying Potential 

The foundation of all succession planning, both formal and informal, is the identification of leadership potential.  While performance statistics and other metrics are important in this equation, much of identifying leadership potential in others is through what the medical industry and sports pundits alike both call the “eye ball test.”

To identify leadership potential, we need to observe and assess.  The “eye ball test” allows us to evaluate personality traits, interactions, and, most importantly, potential.  We can observe team members interactions with fellow team members and in pressure situations.

Not all individuals with leadership potential, however, are the right “fit” for future roles, so once leadership potential is identified, we need to test the individual’s aptitude for leadership and increased responsibility.  For example, high performing team members who “pass the eyeball test” and who have excellent performance metrics might still not be the right “fit” for a leadership role if they are reluctant to take part in professional development or unwilling to learn new skills.

Leading Leaders

Once you have identified leadership potential in candidates for future roles, the next obvious step is to begin to prepare them for those future roles.  Again, this can range from formal to informal, but it should be emphasized that all leadership pipeline training should be purposeful.  Haphazard or inconsistent development training produces similar results—ineffective and under-prepared leaders.

One recommended best practice is to seek out professional training through executive coaching and life coach certifications which can be earned here at MEG through the Madison Coach Academy.  One important certificate program relating to leading leaders is the Certified Emotional Intelligence program which enhances an individual's ability to recognize, understand, manage, and effectively use emotions in various personal and social situations.  In other words, leading leaders again begins with a focus on personal development.

Other best practices for leading others includes providing leadership opportunities and providing support and resources.  We know that effective leadership is a process and is built on both leadership successes and failures.  Without leadership opportunities, future leaders will never get the opportunity to learn and improve.  However, for existing leaders in your leadership pipeline, you also need to ensure lower-level leaders feel supported and have the budgets and resources to succeed.  Otherwise, unhappy middle managers and the team members they oversee may not be around to see out the succession plan.

Final Thoughts

In this blog, we’ve highlighted the importance of leadership potential.  We examined the importance of developing our own leadership potential, identifying leadership potential in others, and developing individuals with leadership potential.

Thank you for reading the Madison School of Professional Development Wednesday Leadership Blog where we highlight leadership best practices each week.  Check out more from this blog and other blogs hosted by MEG.

If you have a topic that you would like to see me pontificate on, drop me an email at info@meg-spd.com.

Dr. Scott Eidson is the Executive Vice President of the Madison School of Professional Development and holds doctoral degrees in both history and business.  When not thinking about leadership, he’s usually thinking about surfing or old Volkswagens.