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Leadership Development and How to Identify Future Leaders

Many organisations struggle with the dilemma of how to identify its future leaders. Who are the ones that an organisation should invest in? Leadership development and training programmes can be a significant expense and so no budget conscious organisation would wish to waste its valuable training budget.

Identifying future leadership potential is a complex issue; however there are a number of steps an organisation can take to improve its ability to identify its future leaders.

The first step in the process is to define the characteristics that an organisation thinks its potential leaders need. These characteristics may include:

• Specific personality trails
• Intelligence
• Initiative and ability to ‘make things happen’
• Level of self motivation
• Particular life experiences
• Ability to empathise and understand others
• Capability of learning and adapting.

Some of this information can be collated by identifying and examining the characteristics of leaders who have been or who are successful in the organisation.

Once the characteristics have been identified a number of different methods can subsequently be used to assess an individual against them, for example:

• Critical thinking, numerical and verbal reasoning tests can be used to ascertain an individual’s thinking capability and innate intelligence.

• Psychometric profiling instruments can identify an individual’s personality traits, likely communication and leadership styles. How do these fit with what the organisation needs?

• 360? feedback tools are valuable for assessing an individual’s performance and behaviour in the workplace. While not a guarantee, historic performance and behaviour will be a guide to how the individual is likely to perform in the future.

• Using a challenge such as asking an individual to lead a business improvement project or a charity/fund raising activity will take them out of their usual work/life experiences, and should provide valuable information about how they handle new and unfamiliar challenges.

• Ask individuals to work on a strategic business or organisational issue. This will provide information about their capability to strategise, see the big picture and take the long term view.

Of course the methods described above will not guarantee the identification of those with the greatest leadership ability and potential. However, they will provide the organisation with a good deal of objective information on which decisions about leadership training and development can be based. In this way organisations should get the most out of the investment they make in leadership training and development.