Are You Preparing Your High Potentials for Future Leadership?

How do you ensure the long-term success of your business? Are you ready to help today’s managers become future leaders for your organization? How do you help your high potentials become great leaders faster? Is there a way to help develop your managers today to become stronger leaders tomorrow? 

The future belongs to businesses who create faster learning organizations. We can anticipate the future if we help create systems that help our teams learn more quickly. Over the past 25 years, I’ve discovered that organizations who build learning into their organization’s culture, do better than organizations who grow through hiring talent from the outside. Are you willing to invest in developing a high potential program?

I’ll share several tools that I’ve seen help accelerate high potentials’ growth within organizations. Today, I share several ideas to consider and then over the coming weeks we will share how you can implement some of these programs.

High potentials should be assessed from the time they enter your organization and throughout their careers. The earlier you can identify high potentials’ strengths, the better you can help your team members accelerate their personal and professional development. I’ve found leaders at all stages of development love taking assessments. You should look for tools that complement your organization’s culture.

High potentials should be assigned a mentor when they enter your organization. Want to retain your people? Develop a mentoring program that works with your onboarding process. People who get mentoring early in their career tend to stick around longer and are more engaged in your organization. Many become great mentors, as well.

High potentials should know what you expect from them as high potentials. I’ve seen many high potential programs fail become the people were uncertain what it meant to be part of these programs. I also believe you must educate your leaders and managers to what’s in it for them when deal with high potentials. Don’t soft sell the impact you believe high potentials have on the organizations success.

High potentials should be involved in many different aspects of your business. Rotational training and employee development programs are one way of helping high potentials better learn your organization faster. Recently, I’ve seen a significant increase in rotational training programs even among my clients. For several years, they seemed to go away, but they have returned with some minor changes and alterations.

Since the rate of change is accelerating, you may need to adjust your high potentials’ training to align with your emerging growth and business strategies. This includes having senior leadership buy-in for your high potentials program. I share how in a future blog!

High potential training programs should incorporate different types of training methodologies. People learn in many ways. Today, there are an abundance of great technology based learning systems to complement your other leadership development processes. Many of these programs also have collaboration capabilities to help increase teamwork during the high potentials’ training.

My bias is to involve external coaches in the development of high potentials. It’s a great way to increase performance and impact in learning organizations. External coaches can help bring new ideas into your organization. I’ve also seen situational coaching help increase your high potentials’ success and confidence in taking on new roles and responsibilities.

Coaching can develop your high potentials strengths and capabilities faster than any other training method. A good coach can provide your high potentials with a sounding board that allows them to develop their leadership skills more quickly. Good coaches can help you assess the progress of your high potentials’ development on a regular basis.

An effective coach can help your high potentials leverage their time and prioritize their efforts. A former client of mine once said he got a day back for every coaching session we did together. With this ROI it was never hard to get him to invest time in his professional development!

Coaching can help develop critical leadership skills that enhance high potentials’ development as their responsibilities go from managers to executives.

Starting next week, we begin sharing how you can develop your people faster.

See you next week.