4 Ways To Spot Potential Team Leaders In Your Company

Identifying potential team leaders in your company isn’t as hard as it sounds. With the proper techniques, you can choose the right employees who can handle more complicated responsibilities. Instead of hiring outside talent to take on leadership roles, determine which among your current employees are qualified for the vacant positions. That way, you can hire individuals who are already familiar with your company, work culture, and day-to-day operations. In order to do so, you may want to consider the following tips:

1. Check Their Performance

Not all employees have the same skill level. Some have more knowledge or experience than others, and this information is nothing new. The question worth asking is how these employees have performed in your company so far.

If you’ve treated each team member properly and given them equal opportunities for improvement regardless of their respective potential, then chances are, their performance has gotten better. They won’t have an excuse such as unfair treatment should they fail to meet your company’s standards.

In such cases, you can use performance-based metrics to spot potential leaders and build an effective performance management strategy. What is performance management? As its name implies, it’s the overall communication process between employees and employers wherein the latter plans, observes, and reviews the former’s way of accomplishing their tasks.

You can let your employees know how their performance affects their rating when you follow this particular process. For instance, a performance-based review can result in the promotion of some employees if it shows that they excel in their current roles. And when you conduct this review, you can immediately identify the ones abiding with your company’s rules and regulations as well.

2. Use An Unbiased Assessment Method

Everyone—even the best leaders out there—has their own biases, so you have to be careful about the metrics you use to judge your employees’ skills and performance. If you only pay attention to employees who’ve achieved your own definition of success, then you’ll be promoting people who resemble you but aren’t necessarily the best ones for the job.

This may seem beneficial at first since you’ll surely work well with like-minded people, but it could cost you more in reality. Since they think like you, they might just commit the same mistakes you normally would. As a result, the much-needed counterbalance in your organization will be eliminated, which could eventually lead to distorted business decisions.

That’s why it’s more advisable to turn to key measurements and tools that’ll help you mitigate the potential issues that might arise due to partiality. Such metrics are crucial in finding employees with great potential. Here’s what you need to do:

• Figure out what success looks like for every leadership role.
• Determine the factors that contribute to that success.
• Assess which team member fits the metric.

3. Provide Opportunities That Promote Leadership Skills

Another great way to assess a team member’s potential for a leadership role is to put them in a situation where they can show and practice leadership skills. This could mean anything from mentoring fellow employees or giving them more complex projects to work on. Try allowing your best employees to take on different roles and handle tasks that could turn them into leaders.

By doing this, you’ll be able to see how well they’ll do in an unfamiliar situation. It’ll also provide you with important information about a particular team member’s mindset and how well they perform under pressure.

In addition, a good indicator of a growth mindset is how a team member views failure. Employees who tend to have a negative perception of failure are more likely to possess a fixed mindset. Meanwhile, employees who remain curious despite a few setbacks and believe that delays or problems are an opportunity to learn means they have a growth mentality. When you consider these factors, you can quickly identify the ones who are potential team leaders.

4. Interview Current Managers And Employees

If you have current or previous managers who’ve worked with your high-potential employees, it’s advisable to get their opinion. After all, they have firsthand knowledge about those individuals. Once you get their assessment; you can then take that into account when evaluating a staff member.

When it comes to interviewing your managers and employees, make sure that you use objective metrics. Stick to behavior-related questions and avoid leading questions. Lastly, be cautious about the people you’ll be asking opinions from as some may be biased toward their colleagues.

Conclusion

Promoting your employees to become team leaders in your company is an excellent way to show that you value them. By giving them leadership roles, you’re acknowledging that their contributions to your company are highly appreciated.

However, while the thought of promoting all of them seems like a good thing to do, it’s best to choose only the most deserving and suitable employees. That way, you can ensure that your other employees and your company are in good hands.