Building Your Leadership Team Bench
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“Great people are going to attract other great people. And when you promote someone to the leadership team, they're going to be able to hit the ground running much faster because they've already got all that history within the company.”
— Mike Goldman
Understanding Change Dynamics
Realization of needing specialized roles (sales and marketing heads)
Challenges of not having suitable personnel for specific roles
Negative impacts of stretched roles (e.g., head of sales and marketing)
Necessity for upgrading the leadership team as the company grows
Importance of a leadership team bench to avoid talent gaps and foster growth
Expanding the Team: Strategic Hiring Insights
Explore internal options for leadership team development
The benefits of building a bench of high-performing internal candidates attract and retains top talent through internal promotions
Enhance leadership team effectiveness with candidates already familiar with the company
The Accelerator Session
Gathering 5-30 high-potential individuals performing at A level
The purpose of the name "accelerator session" is to emphasize the need to speed up identification of leadership candidates
Timing considerations should be either mid-year or before annual planning
Focus on accelerating both leadership identification and annual planning, as well as discussing topics to cover in the session
Suggestion of an external facilitator or coach for effective implementation
The 4 Exercises In An Accelerator Session
Start, Stop, Keep exercise: Identify actions to start, stop, and continue
SWOT exercise: Identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats
Actions to Live By exercise: Generate specific ideas for living organizational values and culture
Top Priorities exercise: Determine top three priorities for next year or remaining months
Utilize breakout groups for larger participation and diverse ideas
Exercises accelerate the identification of leadership candidates and annual planning
The Team Debate - Identifying Leaders
Leadership team then asks questions, gathers valuable info, and identifies capable potential leaders and readiness
Communicate outcomes to engage and collaborate with high-potential
The Mars Team
Mars team's purpose is to enforce culture, purpose, and values. Just as a team would choose one eligible to fly to mars so is this for business culture.
The team now brainstorms ideas for enhancing company culture regularly.
Thanks for listening!
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Welcome to another episode of the better leadership team show. Whether you are walking as I love to listen to podcasts when I'm walking or driving, I do that too, or doing the laundry or whatever you're doing. Welcome back to the show. If you've listened before, thanks for coming back. If you're new to the show, great, glad you found me.
Hopefully you'll love this and then want to go back and listen to the other episodes. But what I want to talk about in this episode, is the importance of building a leadership team bench. The importance of having, high performers who are just ready to hit that next level and could be that bench for the leadership team so that when you need to grow that leadership team, when you need to replace somebody on the leadership team, when you need new ideas for the leadership team you've got folks in your organization, ready, willing, able, excited, passionate about sitting around that table on the leadership team.
So how do we find those people? Who are they? How do we get them ready? Really important questions that I find leaders don't spend enough time thinking about and the impact of not spending enough time thinking about it is you wind up with holes on your leadership team. You wind up at a point where for a long time you've had a VP of sales and marketing that is accountable for both of those functions, sales and marketing, but given the sheer volume of new clients you need to bring in sales meetings, you need to have new marketing qualified leads that you need.
Maybe you've come to the realization that sales and marketing are very different things and you now need both a head of sales and a head of marketing, but you haven't made that move because you don't have the right person. So your poor head of sales and marketing is just stretched way too thin. Maybe you've got somebody on the leadership team who was you know, perfectly wonderful to get you here to get you from startup to wherever you are today, but they're not the right person to get you to that next level. But you're not making a move because you don't have anybody that you trust waiting in the wings to take that position so those are some of the impacts you can have if you don't have a leadership team bench.
But the other one is, your next level leaders, if they don't see a clear path to sitting around that leadership team table, some of your superstars are going to leave for better opportunities where they've got to have a chance to have more impact on the organization. If you're not bringing new folks onto the leadership team every once in a while, You are also not getting a lot of new ideas, new perspectives on the leadership team.
So there are a whole lot of reasons why you need to be thinking about what's next for your leadership team. More importantly, who's next for your leadership team. Now you can certainly hire from the outside. That is one option and it's a good option, but what I want to talk about in this episode is how you build a bench of high performers that are ready to take that next level who are already in your company.
And I want to talk to you about two different methods of doing that because I think that is, is the more important challenge. Yes, it's a challenge to go out and find the right new people, but man, if you could find a way to do that kind of succession planning from within the company, provide those opportunities for people within the company, then you're going to get great people to want to stay.
Great people are going to attract other great people. And when you promote someone to the leadership team, they're going to be able to hit the ground running much faster because they've already got all that history within the company. They've got those relationships already built within the company. So again, we're going to talk about two different tactics that you can take.
And the first one I call the accelerator session. The accelerator session, the way I typically implement it is a once a year. You could absolutely do it twice a year but it's a once a year or twice a year session that you may want to do kind of middle of the year and then right towards the end of the year.
When I say towards the end of the year, the best time to do this is maybe a few weeks or a month before your annual planning process. So if you get together with your leadership team to do annual planning in late November or early December, well, maybe it's late October, early November that you want to do this accelerator session.
Then again, you may want to do it mid year, but let me talk about who's involved. What is it? Why do we call it an accelerator session? So the folks involved in an accelerator session are your next level high potential. Leaders, they may be that one level below the leadership team, the executive team. If you have a large organization, they may be one or two levels below, but you want to gather a group of, depending on how big a company you are of five, 10, it may be 25 or 30 high potential individuals.
Folks who are performing at an A level, folks who you suspect could do more. And you gather those folks together. And the reason why I call it an accelerator session is that the process I'm going to take you through, and this could be a half day session or a full day session that you're taking these folks through.
The reason I call it and call it an accelerator session is because number one, it accelerates the speed at which you can find out who is ready to take that leap and sit around the leadership table. So it accelerates that process. It also, if you're doing this in October, early November, before your annual planning, and you'll see why I say this, it accelerates your annual planning process, given the information you're going to gather and the discussions you're going to have in this accelerator session.
Let's talk about what the topics are in that accelerator session. So you're getting together your 5, 10, 20, 25 high potential leaders and you're taking them through a number of exercises. Normally I like to have this facilitated by an outside facilitator. As a coach of leadership teams, I very often do this for my leadership teams.
You can certainly use another outside facilitator that's not a coach you work with. You could facilitate it internally, but you'll see why I think you're better off getting someone from the outside. So, there are four different exercises that I like doing within an accelerator session and you don't need to use these four.
You may have others, but I like these four. So if you've got a group of five together, you would do these exercises as one group. If you've got, let's say, a group of 20 or 25, you may want to create, four or five groups, subgroups of five people to do this. But the outside facilitator or your coach, would work with these next high potential leaders, number one, to do a start stop keep exercise.
Start stop keep, you've probably heard of, you may have heard it called start stop continue. It is what the name is what it is. So you have that group talk about and then collaborate on as a company, not just for their individual function or department, but as a company have this group come up with what are three things the company is not currently doing that they ought to start doing.
And those could be things operationally, it could be things how you market, it could be brand new strategies, it could be how you're hiring people, it could be anything. But what are three things that the company should start doing that they're not already doing? That's number one. So that's the start
then the stop is what are three things the company is doing that they ought to stop doing? What's the company doing that is just not valuable, not adding, any real valuable impact to the organization. And these folks saying we just ought to stop doing that. And then the keep start, stop, keep that third part.
The keep is what are some things that we're doing today that are really adding value? That man if we stopped everything else, man, we gotta keep doing these things. And imagine if you've got, 10, 15, 20 people in the room, and you've got two, three, four groups of five people doing this. They're each coming up with start, stop, keeps putting it up on flip charts up on the wall, and now they're reviewing it with each other.
So if you have a group of four or five, you're going to have one group doing it. If you have a bigger group, the reason why you want to create these breakout groups, these subgroups. It's number one in a group of 15 or 20, everybody's not going to have a voice. So if you've got a group of 10, 15, 20, 25, you want to create smaller groups.
Number one, so everybody has a voice and number two, because you're going to get a lot more ideas that way. So now imagine you've got two, three, one, two, three, four flip charts up on the wall with some ideas for start, stop, keep that they are presenting to each other. That's the first exercise, Start, Stop, Keep.
The second exercise is a SWOT exercise. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. Same idea in those same breakout groups, or as one group if it's a smaller group of folks. Is that team is collaborating on and agreeing on what are the top three strengths of the organization strengths are things that you want to continue to leverage to be great.
A strength doesn't mean there's no action we can take on it. There may be actions to continue to leverage it. So what are the top three strengths? What are the top three weaknesses that we need to fix? What are the top three opportunities? That we need to go after and what are the top three threats that we need to protect the company from or protect ourselves from again, imagine getting one, two, three, four flip charts on the wall with the SWAT and you're discussing those together amongst those high potential leaders.
So number one exercise is start, stop, keep. Number two is the SWOT. Number three, I call actions to live by actions to live by are really about culture in most organizations. In your organization, you might have. A core purpose, a reason why you might have a set of three, four or five core values. You have things that, that anchor your organization, whether it's a big Y or whether it's values, which is more of, what are the non negotiable behaviors, actions to live by are a way of saying, what are some ideas we can come up with to better live by?
Our values to better live our purpose, to better live our culture versus just having beautiful words on a plaque or a website, or a poster. So again, those breakout groups or one group, if you've got a small group is going to come up with five or so ideas, very specific ideas for actions to live by actions to better make sure your culture.
What's best, right, most noble about your culture, how do we bring those to life? So the those are the actions to live by. So, so far we've got flip charts postering a big part of the room you're in, or virtually, with start, stop, keep, SWOT, and actions to live by exercises. The fourth and last exercise that I normally do is a top priorities exercise.
So imagine you're doing this near the end of the year, you would do it, do top priorities for the next year. If you're doing it mid year, you might do top priorities for the remaining six months of the year. But again, you're getting each of these groups. to collaborate, debate on what do they believe are the top three priorities for the next year or for the remainder of the year.
Those are all flip charts around the room. So you now have the room or your virtual room plastered with flip charts. That have the start, stop, keep exercise, the SWOT exercise, actions to live by, and top priorities. All of the best thinking from your most high potential leaders. Now here's a wonderful next step.
You could leave it at that and it would add incredible value. But the next step is critical. So what I do when I facilitate this as the coach, I then make sure that when we're done with those four exercises, that the leadership team, who is not in the room, by the way, for any of these exercises, I make sure that the leadership team is waiting in the wings.
To then, after probably a little break, the leadership team comes in, with notepads, and they are walking the room, reading what's on all of these different flip charts, taking notes on ideas they love, ideas they hate, questions that they have for the group. I then have, for each of the exercises, someone from each of the subgroups of the breakout groups present to the leadership team, the findings of their group.
And I try amongst the four different exercises to have four different people from each group presenting. So everybody in the group gets a chance to take a leadership role, or most people in the group get a chance to take a leadership role and show their stuff present to the leadership team. The leadership team first listens, takes notes, and then they're asking questions.
And anybody in the group could answer the questions, but they're now asking questions. And not only is that just a wonderful information gathering session for the leaders, unbelievable information to help them plan moving forward. You are seeing amongst all those high potential leaders, who's really taking the lead?
How did they present? Who's answering the questions? How are they answering the questions? Are they getting defensive? All of those things. Great information gathering unbelievable chance to learn from this group. Like I said, that can take, depending on how you do it, take a half day, take a full day. When I've done it as a coach, I've incorporated some learning exercises for that high potential group as well, which makes it a full day.
If you're just doing the exercises, you may get away with a half a day. And again, that information is great feedback back for the leadership team. It is a great accelerator to annual planning or second half planning. And it's also just, incredible information that helps you pinpoint who in that high potential group really might be ready to take the next level.
And by the way, one of the important wrap up pieces of it is make sure in some way, shape or form you're getting back to those folks. You don't have to commit in that session what as a company you're going to go implement. These are not simple things you're going to want to go back and discuss it as a leadership team.
But if you never get back to those high potential leaders and don't implement much of what they've recommended. They're not going to be so excited to try to add value the next time. So in some way, shape or form, you may want to get that group back together and say, Hey, we really appreciate all this.
Here are the things we're going to implement. Here are the things we're not able to implement right now. Here are the things we're thinking about for the future. And here's some help we may need from you moving forward. So that's number one strategy is the accelerator session.
Second strategy I want to talk about, which I actually just had a client do and I know it's going to work out real well for them, but they just made the decision two weeks ago, is to create what I call a Mars team, M A R S, like the planet Mars, to create a Mars team in the organization of next level, high potential leaders, and the job of the Mars team is to Make sure that as a company, you are living the culture, living purpose, living values, similar to one of the exercises we just did, you know, the actions to live by within the accelerator session.
But the Mars team is a team that is together frequently. It's not a one time thing. Now, why do we call it a Mars team? Well, one of the ways that I have my clients discover what their core values are is to do something called a Mars exercise, which I described as an earlier episode about core values, where I described the exercise, it's not my exercise.
It was developed by Jim Collins in, I believe it was in "Good to Great" and to summarize it, it's just a way to discover your core values by saying if you had to send, Five of your team members to another planet, to Mars to help the Martians better understand what's best, right? Uh, Most noble about your culture, who would you send and why?
So you wind up picking your kind of best. The best examples of what's great about your culture, those are those people. Well, I have the entire leadership team do it. So each member of the leadership team may pick a different five people. The reason I call this a Mars team is because the people you pick for this team, and it could be five people, it could be 10 people, a little bit more, probably not much less, but the people you pick
for this Mars team are some of those same people, the people who represent who you are, who you want to continue to be when you are doing your best culturally. So that's how you select people from the team. There's also typically someone from the leadership team. Who champions that team who's involved, making sure they are helping that team stay on track, guide them, knock obstacles out of the way of them implementing things.
Because what you want is you want this team getting together. It may be monthly, it may be every other week. Quarterly is probably not enough, but let's assume monthly. This team may get together monthly for the sheer purpose of brainstorming ideas on again, how to make sure that as a company, you are defining and living your culture at a higher and higher level.
Now, when I talk about culture, I define it as the three V's. Values. What are those non negotiable behaviors? Those are your values. Vision. How do we make sure everybody has a, crystal clear view of where you're going from core purpose, which is your why to your 10 to 15 year big, hairy, audacious goal.
So there's values, vision and then vulnerability. What could we do to make sure we're having open, honest, safe conversations and debates as an organization? So the job of the Mars team is to get together with a level of frequency and say, what could we do as a company to improve those three V's to better live the purpose, to better live the values, vulnerability, all those things.
And there are certain things within that Mars team that you want to give them authority to just go do. Where they don't have to ask for permission.
I remember in the first client I had do this it's a company in Michigan actually a plastic surgery company in Michigan, and they got the Mars team together, the Mars team had their first meeting, and the next day the leaders came into the office, they had five core values, and as they walked up the stairs to the entry area, on each step, They had put these really cool stickers of lettered stickers with the names of each of the core values.
So every time people walked into the office, they would see those core values. Something like that you could do without any permission. I had another client, a client based in New York City, whose Mars team decided to create this awesome video where they interviewed about 10 different people.
Again, they had, I think, five, five core values. So they interviewed two people per core value. And the interviews were people thanking others within the organization for living a core value. So it was a great way to thank people, great way to help people learn a little bit more about what the core values are, what they call core values aren't.
Again, those are two things. That required no permission. They just went and did it and it was phenomenal. There may be other things that do require some approval if we want to go and, change actually how we're defining what the core values are.
If there are, core values pats on the back that you want to make sure that the CEO is giving, during a town hall, But just imagine these are folks within the organization that are not senior leaders who are driven to make sure you are living the culture that you've defined at the highest level and that culture is not only lived but of course understood by everybody
in the organization. And then what I've seen work pretty well is periodically you rotate people in and out of that Mars team. There may be even be certain challenges that you have. I have a company right now that has recently had some retention challenges. So they are tasking the Mars team to find out a little bit more about what is causing that.
About morale and come up with some ideas to improve retention. These folks are a lot closer to the front lines, so they're going to get better information. And remember, I started all this out saying this is about building that leadership team bench. And yes, from the accelerator session from the Mars team, there is so much great productive discussion and action coming out of that.
But a benefit of all of this is you are giving people the chance to begin acting like senior leaders before they're actually sitting around that leadership table. There are a whole lot of additional ideas that I'm sure you can come up with to build that leadership team bench. But hey, I love the accelerator session.
I love the idea of the Mars team. Come up with your own but question I want you to ask yourself and the rest of the folks on your team is what are we doing? What are we doing to build that next generation of leaders the next folks sitting around this leadership table? What are we doing? What is it that we should be doing?
That we aren't doing anyway. Hope that helps Thanks for listening. Look forward to seeing you or hearing you. Actually you don't, I don't hear you and I don't see you. I look forward to you hearing me and or seeing me on the next episode. Take care.