Abstract: The reality of succession and bench strength is that without a plan and strategy, you are unlikely to get the right people in the right place at the right time. The leaders you shape today will serve customers you haven’t engaged in markets you can barely imagine. This article reveals the overall approach to developing the bench strength you need, regardless of the size of your enterprise. Of special importance is the use of pivotal assignments, intentional exposures, and disciplined planning—what we call Assignmentology—which can turn raw potential into legendary leaders. Great leadership isn’t an accident. Here’s how to engineer it.
Whether your enterprise is one of the 49% of businesses with fewer than 5 employees or the .5% of organizations that employ 23% of the workforce, succession planning and bench strength are significant pain points. Business magazines constantly report that Boards, Founders, and Enterprise Leaders stay awake at night trying to figure out who the next leaders are going to be.
While it would be nice to have a 30-year career arc of hiring talented individual contributors who are molded into great leaders, most enterprises face the reality that their talent pool is small and the average age of their current managers spells crisis within a 5 to 7-year period.
Short and Long Term Actions
Fortunately, organizations can take both short-term and long-term actions today to be more strategic about their bench strength, identifying and placing individuals with the most potential in more complex positions, regardless of the runway.
Hiring the right people matters, but organizations often make it more difficult than it needs to be. The failure to develop a success profile of what the ideal contributor looks like for a given position makes future selection of individuals with the right Knowledge, Skills, and Attributes (KSAs) difficult. Key KSAs are essential, and some are more important than others. Without a clear definition of what you are looking for, finding the right people becomes a matter of luck. We strongly recommend creating a portfolio of success profiles for the organization’s positions, as this becomes foundational to finding candidates with the right fit—from individual contributors to executive-level contributors. If you have two years or twenty, creating success profiles is a key to building your bench strength. We make it easy to create these profiles through a virtual card sorting exercise, which flows into creating interview guides to use in evaluating candidates.
Success profiles are also useful when wanting to promote within. If you need to consider internal candidates, having a clear sense of what the essential and mission-critical qualities are makes the job easier.
Identify the Range of Potential
Identifying the range of potential in your workforce is important. In very short order, you can begin to sort individuals into talent who simply want to be the best at what they do (e.g. welding, engineering, accounting, customer service), and those who are ambitious and want to learn as much as they can about as many jobs as they can. And there is a middle group—those who seem to have the potential to learn more but may not feel capable or confident enough to take on more.
With the first group, we need to nurture their sense of excellence and ensure they have ample opportunities to improve their skills. The middle group requires a distinct approach to maximize their contributions to the enterprise. The ambitious and eager group needs to be carefully managed, or else they will seek opportunities elsewhere.
The ambitious group presents certain issues for us—having ambition and being learning agile should not be confused. An individual seeking a promotion to a higher level must undergo a thorough assessment to ensure they possess the intelligence and KSAs necessary for success in higher-level responsibilities. And the failure to attend to weighing in on the durable skills, such as collaborating or communicating effectively, leads to big problems. It matters little if the candidate is the resident Einstein in a given field if no one wants to work with the individual. This is especially costly in a small operation. Overwhelmingly, people are fired for their behavior, despite being hired for their competence and expertise.
Our middle AND ambitious groups need to be evaluated for the potential to take on larger roles and responsibilities. Potential is a measurable set of attributes that TalentTelligent can identify for an enterprise. A second action for these two groups is to identify the assignments — special roles, projects, and collaborations — that will allow them to learn new aspects of the enterprise and activate their learning capabilities, thereby revealing the full range of their potential. We refer to this talent development strategy as assignmentology. And no matter the size of the operation, there are many special assignments that can enable an individual to “go to school” to learn key elements of the enterprise. Even if a short period of time is given to a special assignment, if well placed, the experience is golden for the organization and the individual.
