It’s 3am, Do You Know Who Your Leaders Are?”

An Ask the Expert feature with Lynne Morton, TalentScope

Are you being kept up at night wondering if you have people ready to run your company? Do you even know what kinds of people you should have? These are the kinds of issues that are keeping many people up at night now.

“There is not a shortage of individuals with the potential to be leaders. There is a shortage of leadership identification and retention”
-Lynne Morton, TalentScope

If you are in charge of human resources, these are the kinds of issues that should be keeping you up at night. The business world is under scrutiny to make better decisions, to generate better results, to embed accountability into its processes. And HR should be at the forefront of these improvements.

You might be wondering if there is a dearth of people out there who can lead this way. I don’t think so. I think that there are plenty of individuals with the qualities required for outstanding leadership. I just think that HR needs to show its own form of leadership and find them. Right now, HR is not providing organizations with the processes and tools required to understand what makes an individual a successful leader in a particular organization, it is not having the courage to ask the tough questions that will define leadership and it is not engaging managers in the process of developing the next generation of leaders.

There is not a shortage of individuals with the potential to be leaders. There is a shortage of leadership identification and retention. The good news is that this can be fixed. Follow these few steps and sleep better at night.

First, there are outstanding competency models readily available to help you determine what capabilities will be most important in your organization, your special context. You need to know what you need to have. If you don’t want to use a ‘tried and true’ model, you can conduct your own assessments and create your own model. Cross checking the competencies against leadership values and behaviors is also required, since more leadership and fewer functional skills are needed at higher organizational levels. You need to tweak that leadership model as your business changes, or as the conditions in which you do business change. If you need leaders to take you through tough times, you will want strong communicators and motivators. If you need leaders to take you into a new phase of growth, you will want visionaries and resilient individuals.

Second, there are outstanding tools available to help you assess people within your organization against these leadership attributes. Such assessments ask questions that will help you determine if the person has what it takes, as you see it. Multiple responses, from many perspectives (360 views) are especially helpful here and can easily be held in knowledge repositories. If available to managers, these repositories can be used, with HR, to plan leadership development or manage succession. Technology can be incredibly helpful since it can make this information available to managers anywhere, at any time.

Third, we know that leaders develop leaders, and we also know that managers block leaders. Therefore, it’s essential that managers be engaged in the process of identifying, developing and retaining leaders. Managers need easy-to-use processes for evaluating performance and determining potential. Managers need reasons, business and personal, to become talent spotters. If there is something in it for them, they will mentor others. If the impact on their business is clear, they will put top talent on new teams, give them special stretch assignments and know what will keep that talent onboard. If managers don’t know what teams/assignments exist, or what matters to future leaders, technology can connect them to such information.

Three steps is all it takes. And it’s a golden opportunity for HR to provide the kind of business value that it has long been seeking to add. Seize that opportunity. There’s never been a better time for better leadership.

Lynne Morton, Chief Creative Officer, TalentScope, is a globally recognized thought leader in talent management. She has worked with prominent public and private sector organizations, helping them establish or manage talent and succession processes. She also held leadership roles at PISolutions and PricewaterhouseCoopers. She can be reached at lynne.morton@talentscope.co.