Finding the next generation of leaders

Where are you finding the next generation of leaders to sit around that boardroom table to replace you and others as you get old and gray, or to fill new positions around that leadership table.

I'm hearing more and more frustration more and more concern on the parts of my clients that they can't find those folks. You know, internally, maybe there's folks that don't want that position, maybe life is more important than work.

Maybe it's because the amount of loyalty to one organization has been decreasing like crazy over the last 30 years, or so. So who sticks around long enough to take their place around the boardroom table.

You know, there's a war for talent going on that we hear, you know, more and more about. So going externally to find someone is really hard.

So what are you doing?

What's your strategy, what's something you can control? That's going to help you find and develop the next generation of leaders. And I want to share a technique with you that I learned from a gentleman named Keith Cup, who is one of the best business people I've ever known, the biggest heart in the world. And he's a coaching colleague of mine for many years that taught me this process, and I want to teach it to you.

So it's a process called "The accelerator session". And it's not the only thing you do to develop the next generation of leaders. But it's a wonderful, wonderful technique to help you do that.

The accelerator session is a one, a full day session that you do with your next generation of high potential leaders, with folks internal to your company, it may be the folks one level down from the leadership team, it may go further than that. But it's getting together whether it's you know, six, or eight or 40, high potential leaders within the organization.

They're not ready for the boardroom yet.

But you sense that at some point, they might be or at least, you want to test that out, and you want to start developing them.

So "The accelerator session" happens about a month before your annual planning session, as a leadership team.

Now, I'm assuming you have an annual planning session, if you don't do that first.

But about a month before the annual planning session, you get these high potential leaders together for a full day of working not with you but working with each other. You'll come in a little bit later. And in that full day, and as a coach, I facilitated that. But you can have someone within your organization facilitate it, within that full day you have these leaders get together and do a number of exercise. It's not a leadership development day. It's not let's teach them how to be leaders.

It's a day when you allow them, you give them the power to start acting as leaders. And some of the exercises I've had those next generation of leaders do is number one is SWOT analysis. What are the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, not within their area of accountability, but for the company. And if it's a room of 40 people, you break it into eight groups of five, and you have them do a SWOT analysis together.

I've had them do a start, stop, keep exercise together. I've had them tell core values stories, and come up with actions on how they think as an organization, you can do a better job of living the core values, I have them come up with what they think the top two or three priorities for the company should be in the next year. What are the top two or three rocks, which are quarterly priorities for the first quarter of the year, by the time the day is almost done there are flip charts all over the wall with all the great thinking of these next high potential leaders.

Then, the leadership team comes in, walks around the room, looks at the flip charts, takes notes, writes down questions.

And then one by one, the members of this next level of high potential leaders presents to the leadership team.

The SWOT analysis, the start, stop, keep, the core values actions, the you know the priorities for the year, the rocks for the quarter. And the leaders ask those folks questions.

There are so many positive outcomes of that meeting.

One is you get all these high potential leaders that probably don't work together very much actually working together, getting to know each other, creating relationships that they may be able to leverage moving forward, you get the cream of the crop, to actually rise up and be the ones that are doing a great job answering the questions, doing some of the presentations, coming up with the great ideas. And as a leadership team, you can see that and start seeing who are those next generation leaders that have real potential? Not to mention, one of the reasons it's called an accelerator session.

One is because you're accelerating their leadership capabilities and your succession planning. But you're also accelerating your annual planning process, because all of that information around the walls, all of that information, from the presentations they're giving, from the questions they're answering, all of that information is wonderful information for you as a leadership team to use in your annual planning. So again, this isn't the end all be all of finding your next generation of leaders. But it's such a wonderful technique to use.

And you know, especially as we're coming up to annual planning session season, think about it, execute on it, I promise you, you're going to get at the very least some great information from your next generation of leaders. But you're also going to get an idea of who are some of those folks that are next to sit around the boardroom table