Pointers For Identifying Leadership Potential

One of the critical levers to help you achieve your business goal is to align, develop and promote the right talent. The challenges that organizations face while doing this and taking managers input during this process is the amount of bias that can come into any of these decisions. Hence, it’s always recommended to form a council that includes managers (of the individual being considered for promotions /potential) and skip managers (assuming that a high potential employee would have demonstrated visibility at this level).

This leadership council meeting can be a moderated discussion keeping the following success factors in mind for identifying leadership potential. Managers should be ready with real life instances of employees demonstrating these qualities.

ORIENTATION TO DEVELOPMENT

o Feedback – Demonstrates openness, accepts feedback and constantly works to make changes.
o Learning agility – Learning agility is our ability to learn, adapt, unlearn, and relearn to keep up with constantly changing conditions.

ALIGNED TO CULTURE AND VALUES

o The individual should be aligned to the culture and values of the organization and depending on the level should also demonstrate examples of modeling these behaviours.

VUCA WORLD

o Adaptability – the prospective potential employee should have demonstrated adaptability in embracing change and in adjusting readily to new situations.
o Navigating ambiguity – the individual should have demonstrated confidence in navigating ambiguous situations and managing to deliver his/her best performance in these situations.
o Innovation – The individual should have demonstrated instances of looking at things from a new perspective and having a similar approach when it comes to solving complex problems.

HUMAN LEADERSHIP TRAITS IN THE CURRENT WORLD

o Human connection – given the world we are in, not only does a future leader need to be curious, creative, and execution-oriented, they also now need to be empathetic, inclusive, and highly flexible.
o Facilitating collaboration – Does this individual demonstrate new ways of facilitating collaboration and connection in a hybrid world.

Do you think these factors are sufficient, or are we missing something? Do share your thoughts with us.