Find potential leaders
First, you have to know who your top performers are so you can prepare them for advancement. To get an accurate picture of your employees’ performance and capabilities, you have to measure them on various scales and from multiple perspectives.
“You try to have a blend of both quantitative objectives and the more subjective sorts of judgments and roll all those together to determine the overall performance level,” Vadnais says.
You want to evaluate employees’ current leadership abilities to deduce their future capabilities. For Vadnais, this starts with an evaluation of their problem-solving skills.
Consider how often employees ask for assistance in their current role. If they need frequent oversight to make decisions for 15 people, they’re probably not ready to handle 50. Your future leaders, however, can work independently and confidently without hand-holding.
Knowing how important communication is in his role, Vadnais also evaluates employees’ communication skills by watching how comfortable they are delivering messages.
“You may ask them to give a speech at the next company meeting about the new product that they just announced,” Vadnais says. “You see how they perform there: Were they effective? Were they convincing? Did the audience buy in to what they were doing?”
You should also look for employees who are highly motivated to advance. Sometimes, the search becomes a two-way street because these people may approach you.
“Those are the people that many times come to you and say, ‘Hey, what do I have to do to get ahead here?’” Vadnais says. “If they’re motivated to get ahead, then they become good students, good listeners, good learners of the skills necessary to do that.”
But you can’t base decisions solely on your opinion of people’s traits. When Vadnais examines managers, he also turns to their employees, gathering input through anonymous surveys that ask them to evaluate their leaders. Sure, those ratings are still subjective, but they’re more measurable than your independent appraisal.
“You’re always finding something that you can look at to try to assess what that performance is, as opposed to just being totally subjective,” he says. “You always want to try to find some metrics that give you some support to that.”
The results of an employee’s department are a good starting point to measure their performance objectively. But unless a position is specifically tied to achieving certain revenue, for example, you usually can’t hold one person responsible for the business results.
You also have to understand the context of those metrics by weighing results against the rest of the company and the marketplace. You have to know what employees are up against, because especially in this economy, financial downtrends shouldn’t automatically infer poor leadership.
“Everybody can do well when the environment is good,” Vadnais says. “But when the environment is not so good, you sometimes find out who your best leaders are because they’re the people who make the best out of a not particularly good situation.”
