How to Train High-Potential Employees for Leadership Positions | Power Theory 011

We want to help people achieve balance. If someone's working 60 hours a week, I want to call in my office and help them figure that out. If they're working 60 hours a week and they don't have any way out of it, the last thing they're going to do is take a project or a leadership position that they're going to assume is going to require more time. Hi, this is Russ Paulette. I'm an executive coach. I teach people leadership, personal agency and power, and how to be successful in their careers. A primary need and concern for organizations is who's going to lead the organization. And today we're going to talk about how to identify and develop your high potential workers and future leaders. We're going to go over why it's important, how to find them and then also what to do with them and how to develop them. Even with the best intentions, companies are not paying attention to developing their employees. The number one concern today for leaders is leadership and succession. Who's going to take over the company? Who's going to take over the business? Who's going to take the senior roles? Who's going to step into those big projects? And as of late, there's kind of a tendency for people not to want to necessarily get into leadership roles. And that's because we confuse work life balance with some other things, and we kind of look at it the wrong way. The fact is, is that being a leader is an awesome experience. You have great agency, you get to do really cool things and learn, but we're not taking care of people and really preparing them for those for that succession. There's a concept of the Pareto principle, which basically says that 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort. Yeah, you look around your organization, you have probably 20% of the people that are really doing most of the value for the company. That doesn't mean the other 80% is not doing stuff. It's just that the 20% are really doing the heavy lifting, and there's a tendency for us to not do anything about that. If someone's really working hard and really doing great in a job, then leave them there. Let them do that. They're happy about it, you're happy about it, and everything's fine. Things are going to change. And even those 20% of the people might not be prepared or ready to step up into leadership. So we really have to focus on really developing high potential employees, high potential future leaders, and making sure our, our staffs are being developed within, you might say, well, why should I? You know, why should we invest in these people? They don't stay. Well, that's not necessarily true, because people are going to stay when their well being is satisfied, and most of the time, their well being is going to be satisfied when they're providing value and they're feeling really confident about that value. And they also see a path or they also see successes that they can contribute to. If we look at the definition of transformational leadership, it really requires three things. It requires stimulation. People need to be stimulated to help the company transform, to help themselves develop, help themselves grow people. The myth is, if we don't want to give people too much work, we don't want to push them too hard. But that's not true. People want to be stimulated. They want interesting work. That that's somewhat of a challenge. And they need experiences. We need to give people experiences. And maybe don't even ask them. Put them in situations where they have to really test their abilities and test their skills and test their value, and we have to build confidence in people. These three things can be done a number of ways, but the first problem is really how to find these people. Who are they? First of all, you have to be intentional about it. It's not something. Again, my old boss, the company, was doing it in a casual way. It was left to the managers and supervisors to decide who might succeed them. And it was usually done in the moment when it was needed. It wasn't something that was planned out. You can really be intentional about developing people and making sure that they're prepared for whatever the next challenge is, whatever the next leadership situation is, whatever their potential would be. And being intentional means setting up programs and doing different things. But really, so you want to be intentional, looking for these people and finding them and making sure you identify them. You want to use your intuition. Odds are if we took five random people and asked them who the high potentials were in the company, most of those five would probably identify pretty closely who they were. We know who they are. Your intuition knows you know who they are. Now, you might have doubts about their tenure or their abilities, or their skill sets, or you might have, or their willingness, but you can't make those assumptions. Your intuition is telling you that there's something there. And like any good leader, you wanna draw that leadership out of other people. So use your intuition about who it is that you wanna engage. Performance evaluations and standard human resource tools are extremely valuable. I wanna have a performance review every year. I wanna know how I'm doing. I want some feedback on what I could do better. Now, I'm not saying we do that elegantly, necessarily, or a big problem is a lot of companies just forget to do it, or they just don't fit it in their schedule, or. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say, oh, I haven't had a performance review for a year, a year and a half. Performance reviews are very important, and that will help you identify people's aspirations, what kind of things they're looking for, give you a sense of where they might need to improve. Managers and peers know who they are. So if you're in a management team, you could probably identify one or two people in your group, and you might be hesitant about it, but, you know, you generally know who they might be. And let me just give you a little story. There was once an executive assistant that worked in a company that I worked for. She was put on this intentional development path, and she soon became president. Not soon, but within about ten years, she became president of one of the divisions. Now, how is that possible? Because they recognized her abilities even in the executive assistant role. Right. That role is critically important. The people that are good at that really have great skills. They just needed to give her some basic domain knowledge and give her some experiences and let her lead, and she did a fantastic job. So this story, it's not necessarily the next in line. It's usually people that are buried in the company that are really doing great work, and we all know who they are don't allow people to kind of hoard or keep their people to themselves. I've been in this situation where I had people work for me that was so valuable that I was actually afraid to send them out. I was afraid to give them exposure because if I did, they might leave. That's really the wrong mindset. Managers, supervisors, and directors and people in the organization that have really good employees will. They might tend to not give people that experience. I mean, I had one experience myself. I was working in one division, and I had an interview in another division, and I got hired. And the guy called me back a week later. He said, I'm sorry, I can't take you. We want you to take the job, but we were told to leave you alone. So I was stopped in the tracks by my bosses because I was providing value and they didn't want to let me go. Now, I can look at that two ways. It's a good thing, I suppose, because I was providing value, but. But really, that was like, that's the wrong mindset. Don't allow people to, you know, you can share people. I mean, we're living in a world now. We can do project work and we have, you know, matrix organizations and there's opportunities to do stuff. Allow your people to be able to do that because that's where they're going to get the experience. Feedback from colleagues. If you hear from colleagues, wow, they did a great job on that. So you get a sense of who these people are. Look for who's working smart, not hard, the person that is putting in 70, 60 hours a week. They might be the person, they might be high potential or they might not. I think that what you have to look for is the people that people that really do a good job getting things done on time and on schedule and kind of in a managed time frame, they have the ability to delegate. They have the ability to bring people into the team, to inspire the people to do work. Those are kind of the folks. So you have to identify them and, you know, the next step is then what do you do with them? Like, what's the next step? Well, and this, people will disagree with me about this, but I fully believe that you need to tell them who they are. They need to know who they are. And, you know, those of us that have had some success in life found out that we had skills by accident. It wasn't like people were always telling us the value we were providing. But once we found out that, well, I'm actually really valuable or I'm really offering value there, that was important. But when you're told that you're a high potential employee, someone who's valuable to the company, that's going to either do one of two things. It's either going to make you leave because you're afraid to take on those positions and you don't want to push people into these things, you want to kind of nurture them into that, or they're going to get excited and stay and realize that they have a future here and that, you know, then you have to demonstrate it with activities that allow them to grow. Send them to programs, you know, send them to conferences, send them on special projects, send them to leadership programs. There's lots of leadership programs they can go to. And even if they have a master's degree in management or whatever they have, even if they have advanced degrees, it's like, it's good to be reminded. It's good to remember like these, these things or learn particular skills or hone particular skills. Leadership programs are great for letting people reflect on their leadership and reflect on the strengths and weaknesses they have. You want to provide these people stretch assignments. That means that, you know, if an assignment comes up that's hard, that requires a little bit of tenacity, and you, you know, and you can't say, well, they're too busy to do that. They're too important to what they're doing now. To do that, you have to allow them to get involved in these projects, let them lead a few projects, let them get involved in the company in a different way. Now what's going to happen is, you might say, well, how are they going to get their work done? They'll figure it out. You'll figure it out. How many times have you been in situation where someone has left or someone's time, someone had to leave, take a leave for a certain reason, and you figure it out. You backfill it. You figure it out. The team pitches in. It makes people work a little smarter. There's no excuse for not putting people in these stretch assignments. You want to help people with balance and confidence. So the number one thing that I see when coaching somebody who especially took on a leadership position or is aspiring to take on a leadership position or aspiring to take on something that's tough is that they'll say, well, geez, I, you know, balance is important to me, and I really don't have the time to be able to do those things. That is a, that, that's a erroneous assumption. It's not true. Yes, it might be true that the tasks can't be done at the same level of intensity, but things can be done. I, when I was in, when I was taking graduate classes, I was taking one course at a time, and my friend sitting next to me in the office was taking two or three courses at a time. And so when he announced he was graduating, I'm like, well, I have a whole nother year to go. And he said, russ, why are you taking one course at a time? I said, because, you know, I have to get an a. He goes, we'll take two or three courses at a time and get a b. A b is not bad. So he fit in his job, two or three classes a term, plus all the extra activities he was doing, because he managed his time well, and he found balance in that. Balance is not necessarily a time factor, you know, and I've done a video on balance in the past that you can go back and look at, but it's not about, you know, we want to help people achieve balance. If someone's working 60 hours a week. I want to call my office and help them figure that out. I don't want them. I'm not going to take work away from them. I might rearrange things or help them prioritize or help them learn that their value is not the time they spent in the office, but the time that they're actually thinking and being strategic about what they do. That's where the real value is. So balance, you want to help people with this because they struggle with it. If they're working 60 hours a week and they don't have any way out of it, the last thing they're going to do is take a project or a leadership position that they're going to assume is going to require more time. It's going to mean 80 hours a week, and they can't physically do it. So you want to help people understand that concept and how to deal with that. You also want to build their confidence. Right. Look, I've been, you know, I've been coaching for a while now, and the number one thing that we deal with, and, and I deal with it personally. And I deal with it personally, my family, like, there's certain things we don't have confidence about. We want to build confidence. We want to build personal power. We want to build personal agency. We want to make sure that these things are important. So confidence is something that you need to make sure they're developing. They build confidence by having experiences, being able to use their voice, having a sense of value for their, their domain knowledge and their ability to finish things. And they're only going to get that confidence by being thrown into the environment and get that stuff done. You want to provide visibility for people. The more visibility that they have, the more they're spending time with other executives and other leaders and other groups of people in the company, the broader their knowledge is going to be. If they're in engineering, they should spend time learning, being in some finance meetings, they should spend time with the sales group, they should spend time with operations. They should get involved in special projects that might involve systems that allows them to be visible across the company and build relationships and support and allow their leadership skills to kind of emerge. And they can build their brand. Right. So when it comes time for you to promote them, they're going to feel more confident because they know, they know a little bit more about the organization and they know more about the people, but it's going to build the confidence of people around them. Oh, yes. That person is, you know, this person led this project and that project so it's really important that they get visibility. And it goes without saying that you want to give them feedback, lots of feedback, lots of support. Even when they make a mistake or they fail, you want to give them that support. You want to give them mentoring, whether it's a formal mentoring program or make sure that, you know, if this person isn't reaching out for mentors, talk to your colleagues, see if they'll spend time with them. Have them take them with them to meetings, have them spend time with them and then give them coaching, provide them coaching, whether it's, you know, you spending, you know, a couple hours a month with them, just spending time talking about how they feel about things and build their confidence and give them some mentoring in that process. That's going to be extremely valuable. Again, it's got to be deliberate. Now back to the question of, you know, well, do we let them know and do we let other people know? I'm a big advocate for letting them know and let the other people know. I don't think it should be hidden now. I think we want to check egos. We don't want them running around the company saying, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to. I'm a high potential. That's not the case. You wouldn't have chosen if they, that was their mindset. But you want to make sure that they know that they have special skills that they're going to be focused on developed. And I think it's okay for the company to know that certain people without announcements and that, but it's okay that other people know that they're on a special track. Lots of big companies have internal leadership development programs. I mean, everybody knows that the people going on those programs are likely to be the people that will be successful in the future and might have opportunities for roles. It doesn't guarantee anything. They have to do the hard work, but it's okay that the opportunity is there. If we don't take care of these folks, if we don't spend time deliberately nurturing people, making sure that they're prepared, making sure they build their confidence, making sure that they tap into their ability to learn and grow and fail. If and they're not stimulated, they're going to figure that out eventually and they're going to go somewhere else. Especially in this climate of wanting leaders and wanting to keep your best people, you really need to focus intentionally on developing your high potential employees. If you like this video, subscribe below.See all