Maximizing Leader Potential

Imagine this leadership scenario: Over the last two months, you completed the analysis of your staff creating this year’s succession plan. You have selected potential replacements for your key positions, along with identifying your high potential employees.

Ahhhhh, finally done! Another project checked off the list; and something else you don’t need to think about for the next 10 months.

But wait a minute, Buster! Not so fast! Your succession plan should not be a once-a-year project that gets put on the shelf or back into a filing cabinet when you complete it. Rather, it should be utilized regularly throughout the year as a valuable guide that will help you plan, prioritize, and implement leadership development programs throughout the year.

Next Level Leadership

Ask yourself these questions to see if your organization is really ready with your talent plan:

  • Do your “up and coming” associates have the skills and talent needed to move to the next level?
  • Their technical skills may be outstanding, but do they need grooming relative to leadership skills, behavioral quirks, understanding of how the entire organization operates, cross-functional assignments, or do they need something as basic as improving their organizational skills?
  • What are you doing to maximize leader potential of your high potentials and those on your replacement chart?
  • Will they be ready when you decide to retire or when Joe the VP of customer service decides to leave the organization or Maria the CIO becomes permanently disabled?
  • Will you have replacements trained to immediately step into their new roles?

Maximizing leader potential is not merely putting their names on a replacement chart and assuming they can step into a new assignment.

It is a comprehensive strategic plan that keeps your business green and growing while adding more predictability to short and long-term stability.

Reality Check

Maximizing leader potential requires conducting assessments to identify their strengths and developmental needs and to determine if their soft skills are in line with your organization’s leader competencies. Assessments give your high potentials and key position replacements feedback from their bosses, peers, direct reports, and customers identifying their strengths and developmental needs.

And here’s where a leadership coach can provide valuable assistance – using that feedback to develop formal training programs that will to take advantage of the individual’s strengths and improve one or two of the the areas where they have major developmental needs.

Practice Makes Perfect

A coach can help develop roadmaps to improve your up-and-comers’ deficiencies. The roadmaps will include assignments with mile markers and timelines. It should include “deliberate practice” as identified by Geoff Colvin in his book Talent is Overrated.

Think of it this way with an example from practicing golf:

Hitting golf balls on the range is practice.  It may help improve the golfer’s score, but it won’t enable them to reach the pinnacle of golf.  But, having a swing coach that identifies needed changes to one’s grip, backswing, club placement, stance, etc., giving regular feedback, ensuring repetition, and measuring improvement is “deliberate practice” that will enable a golfer to move to the next level

A leadership coach helps design, monitor, and measure training programs to specifically improve an individual’s leadership performance.  Even high potentials and key replacements can’t develop their own improvement programs without assistance.

They don’t know what they don’t know.

Coaches generally have years of practical experience and are able to identify the skills and talents that will enable your superstars to move to the next level.  Coaches generally interject “real-life” experiences into the training programs that are not part of typical college curriculums.

Conducting assessments, developing SMART goals, monitoring performance and giving feedback helps “up and comers” identified in the replacement charts to be ready for their next assignments.

Is your succession plan collecting dust? Are you challenging your high potential employees? Are you regularly meeting with your direct reports and giving them honest and constructive feedback? Do your “up and comers” have roadmaps and coaches to help them get to the next level? Are you “Maximizing Leader Potential” in your organization?

Bookmark Maximizing Leader Potential

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Mark Fryer is owner of Mark Fryer and Associates
Helps clients with Succession Planning, Exec Coaching, & Org Development
Email | LinkedIn | Twitter | Web | Blog | 706.718.2349

Image Sources: lowesforpros.com, blog.codesignstudios.com, actionawards.com

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