Business owners need to consistently identify future leaders within their companies. Future leaders are key counterparts to move your company forward through innovation and expansion. Not every employee you hire will be effective leadership material. It is not always easy to identify team members with the proper expertise, abilities, and experience to flourish as a leader. However, if you are able to identify them, it could lead your business to reap massive rewards looking into the future.
Potential leaders could be the future managers of your company, tasked with motivating your employees, and responding to customers. Here’s how you can identify future leaders in your company.
- Assess Potential, Not Performance
When you are analyzing the future leaders of your company, be sure to assess potential, not performance. Performance is a measure of current expertise and abilities. However, it does not necessarily dictate who is a leader.
When you look beyond performance, you can better assess an employee’s ability to communicate, manage a team, influence organization, as well as their aptitude to grow. At the same time, some employees that excel in their current position are just not cut out to be leaders. As you develop your leadership scale, make sure to give potential more priority then performance.
- Focus On Job Rotation
Focus on job rotation in your business in order to identify future leaders. Constantly change the roles and responsibilities of high-potential employees. Constant job rotation challenges, stretches abilities, and grows employees intrinsically. Place your well-trained employees in unfamiliar roles. This rotation allows you to cross-train your future leaders and boost their departmental versatility. These processes are essential for leaders who will eventually oversee multiple departments. At the same time, it gets your employees exposure to new skills and an expansion to their expertise. For example, you can grow your sales management team by recruiting sales professionals and rotating them into different parts of the company. Throughout the process to identify future leaders in your company, ensure you are consistently focusing on job rotation.
- Analyze Emotional Intelligence
Analyze each employees level of emotional intelligence when identifying future leaders of your company. It is often believed that brilliant leaders have excessively high levels of emotional intelligence. Potential leaders are able to articulate their feelings clearly and directly. They are not weighed down by negative emotions like worry, victimization, hopelessness or fear. Leaders are self-aware. They ask about company issues or problematic occurrences, and propose possible solutions in exchange. At the same time, leaders are constantly assessing specific business scenarios from all angles, in order to devise the best list of possible solutions. Furthermore, emotionally intelligent leaders do not feel motivation through intangibles like power, status, fame, approval, or wealth. Instead, these leaders are motivated by intrinsic features that compel them to do what is right. Throughout your process, be sure to look for emotionally intelligent leaders.
- Measure Communication Abilities
In analyzing your company’s future leaders, measure each employees communication and listening abilities. Effective leaders possess superior communication skills. They are able to present unique, interesting ideas, clearly, concisely, and formally. At the same time, they are listening to others to understand clearer, learn more, and effectively strategize. Many business owners will tell you that effective leaders listen twice as much as they speak.
Be aware that leaders with effective communication skills may not be the most vocal employee in the room. In many cases, it is not about who talks the loudest or speaks the most. Many leaders are able to convey brilliant information with just a few, carefully chosen words. Consider an employee’s ability to listen to and communicate with others, in order to identify the prospective leaders of your company.
- Gauge Comfort Level
In order to identify future leaders in your company, you need to gauge employee’s comfort level. Leaders like to maintain some level of discomfort. Other employees may be comfortable with their current position, pay, and performance. Great leaders, on the other hand, are constantly looking for ways to grow, learn more, and expand. They understand that failure is a part of life and are not afraid to make mistakes as long as they are growing. Prospective leaders accept direction from their superiors, learn from their team members, and do not hold a grudge against failure. Seek employees exhibiting this behavior to identify future leaders within your company.
There are several strategic methods to identify future leaders within your company. When you analyze employee efforts, focus on potential not performance. Constantly look to implement job rotation in order to test employees in other strategic departments while simultaneously cross-training to boost their versatility. Analyze your employees’ emotional intelligence to gauge how they interact with superiors, clients, and team members. At the same time, you should measure their communication and listening abilities. Furthermore, gauge employee comfort level to identify the employees interested in trying new things, expanding, and remaining uncomfortable. Now you’re ready to identify future leaders in your company.
