How do you decide who will make an effective future leader?
Claudio Fernandez-Araoz, Senior Adviser, Egon Zehnder International says to win the war for talent, you need to identify and develop high-potential employees in your organization.
He says high-potential employees have the following five defining characteristics.
1. The right motive for desiring leadership. I.e. make an impact on others by serving them and for the good of the company.
Related article: Leadership competencies and the needs they meet.
2. Four essential leadership assets.
– They know how to make sense of information and discover new ideas.
– They know how to communicate a compelling vision (by engaging the emotions and logic of others)
– They show resolve and keep driving toward goals despite setbacks. I.e. they are persistent.
– They always seek out learning opportunities.
3. They can envision themselves as leaders. They can see themselves leading a team and producing results that impact the people and the organization.
4. They have the right technical skills needed to do the job or have the motivation and ability to learn them on the job.
5. Have the specialized knowledge needed to do well in a leadership role or have the motivation and ability to acquire that knowledge.
Watch his HBR video here.
My commentary on Mr. Fernadez-Araoz ideas on choosing future leaders.
I think his points are very good. I, however, prefer to use Leadership competencies both to choose future leaders and to evaluate them in the future. I think the standards that leaders will be measured by when they are fully developed can be used to recruit future leaders. I think the 80/20 rule works with recruiting future leaders. 80% of the work of developing leaders is done when they walk through the front door, that is at the time of recruitment. An organization can then put the additional 20% work needed to get that person into top leadership form.
There are some advantages to using the same leadership competencies for the two roles mentioned above. First, It allows you to see the progression from when they were hired to when organizational resources have been used to develop them. Second, it’s easy to have one set of competencies that multiple criteria.
Even though you can see many of the ideas Mr. Fernandez-Aroaz posits in the leadership competencies shown above, his ideas help me see the same information reinterpreted in different words. That helps it stick more.
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