Leadership Succession – Developing your High Potentials

By Mark Evenden at Developing People

You may have identified a number of people as high potentials in your organisation, but how do you develop them to ensure that they reach their full potential? It is certainly not appropriate in today’s organisational climate to simply leave them to it. Organisations need to continually change and develop and their high potentials will need to change, develop and ‘move with the times’ as well.

So what should your company do? The following is a guide to help you to develop your high potentials.

1. Make the development of your high potentials an issue for the Board. As the part of the strategy of the business, they needs be a clear plan to define the types of skills, behaviours and experiences its leaders will need in the future.

2. Be clear with your high potentials what it is they need to learn and don’t simply assume that they should work on their weaknesses. What is it that will add the greatest value to their performance and ultimately the organisation’s performance? Many leaders succeed because they maximise the impact of their inherent strengths.

3. Provide ‘on the job’ opportunities for your talent to flourish. Search for business improvement projects that need a leader, opportunities to undertake new roles or gain international experience. Experience shows that people will raise their performance to what is being requested of them. Take them outside of their comfort zone to find out what they are ‘really made of’.

4. Provide a range of options to support them to develop. This might be attending a leadership development programme or being given leadership coaching support. Coaching is a very powerful way to enable high potentials to develop quickly.

5. Provide networks both internally and externally. High potentials can benefit from shadowing leaders in their own or other organisations and learning from them how they use their skills and behaviours to inspire their staff.

Ultimately the long term success of your business resides with your high potentials. Surely, the development of these people is far too an important business issue to be left chance?