Recruiting Leaders and Managers

Helen O'Brien writes:

Looking for a new leader or manager? Why not grow them from within your business? If you’re looking to develop your own managers and leaders, there are a number of things you will need to consider…

Administration

Administration of the scheme will almost likely sit with HR, but to be successful it must be headed by a senior decision-taker who has a broad overview of the business, and clear vision of its future direction. It will also need the support of the current management team as they will need to encourage and mentor potential leaders and managers.

Assessing the Talent

Once you have decided on a scheme you should then ask your managers to assess the people who work for them. An existing performance appraisal system may already provide this information, but make sure that it does so thoroughly. Otherwise give your management staff some training, and then set them on to assessing their people.

Who appears to have talent in areas such as financial, commercial, technical, human relations? Who consistently does more work than their job demands? Who has shown an ability to solve problems, to deal with tricky human relationship situations, to show a clear understanding of budgetary and other financial issues? Who displays initiative?

Understanding the Potential Talent

Through this exercise you will have an understanding of the potential within the organisation. From there you will need to relate this to the probable future needs of the business. From this, he or she will have a good idea of the employees who could be usefully developed into future managers.

Once you have identified suitable candidates meet with them to discuss their future, what they want and what the organisation anticipates they will be able to achieve so that their personal needs meet the business needs.

Development Programme

Each employee will require an individual development programme. Development may take the form of training off-site, or courses run internally on, say, financial management. But consider also attachments to other sections of the business with a guided learning plan, shadowing senior staff for a period, giving the employee a project to carry out, and seminars where, either individually or in a team, the employees are given demanding scenarios to deal with. Be sure throughout to replicate as far as you can the pressure they would be dealing with in reality and, most important, monitor their performance and give regular feedback.

Undertake all this and you will have waves of well-trained people ready to step into the positions of managers who are reassigned or leave. And if some of your trainees themselves leave, don’t worry. As you have treated them well, they may come back with broader experience. In the meantime, you may have to recruit outsiders whose experiences will help season the pot.