Recruit top talent
Before you can develop leaders from within your ranks, you need to have the raw materials to work with. That is an issue that has to be addressed in your recruiting and hiring process.
Recruiting is not an exact science. No matter how much of a background file you compile on a job candidate, no matter how forthcoming the candidate’s references are, pulling the trigger on the right hire still comes down to little more than an educated guess.
Ideally, Morel says you want the opportunity to view potential recruits in real-life business situations to gauge their reaction to stress and juggling multiple tasks. But that is not an option in many cases. So you need to simulate that to the best of your ability in an interview setting.
“You get a pretty good flavor for a person’s abilities during the interviewing process,” Morel says. “You’re never 100 percent sure, but what I typically like to do, particularly for entry-level and younger candidates, is talk a bit about their upbringing, what things they think shaped who they are, what role their parents played. From there, you work more toward the technical skill sets.”
Younger management candidates will likely be well-schooled in their area of study, but perhaps lacking in versatility. Morel says you want to find out how willing and able they will be to diversify their skills and areas of expertise in your organization.
“If you have someone who is maybe in their first job, you might have someone who is savvy in one area, and you can identify that pretty quickly. Then you want to find out how broad-based they are by asking questions about what is in the news currently and whether they are familiar with it,” he says.
“We might ask a young college graduate what they think of health care reform and what they think the downstream implications will be. It’s not a right or wrong answer that we’re looking for. We’re looking for that clear indication of whether they are up to speed with what is going on in the world, whether they can think in a pressure-packed situation, which helps give us an idea of what kind of manager they might become.”
