Getting Promoted Essentials: How Your Company Picks Future Leaders

Wouldn't you love to know what those executives are talking about in talent review meetings? Who are they talking about, and what are they saying? Let's pull back the curtain a little bit, it's such an interesting process.

What is talent management? Talent management is a process by which senior leaders come together to consider and plan for the people in their organization to make sure that they're preparing a great bench of future leaders to be ready to go when they are needed.

Senior leaders want to ensure that they don't have any big risks (e.g., only one person can do a mission critical job), that they don't have continuity issues (e.g., someone’s getting ready to retire and no one is ready to step into that role), and that they have leadership development practices that produce the results they’re looking for.

To get the most beneficial impact for your career out of understanding of the talent process, I invite you to put yourself in the execs’ shoes, consider the whole thing from their perspective, and reverse engineer your career management practices to align with what they’re trying to accomplish.

So imagine you're an executive and you've invited your team for a talent review. They come into the room with information about either their direct reports or their direct reports' reports, which are sometimes called two-downs, and you're all going to talk about them: their performance, their potential, their strengths, their areas of opportunity. You're going to think about what could be next for them and you'll discuss what everyone perceives about each other's team members. You’ll work together to get on the same page with how you’re viewing and assessing performance, potential and readiness.

Why do this process? Your Board of Directors likely want to know that you're planning ahead to continue to have the right people in the right roles with right skills to have the organization succeed. Organizations, especially big ones, want to know that their future leaders are going to be culture carriers who continue the way of doing business that's favored by the organization. It also makes the organization more attractive to high potential employees who want to know that their development is being carefully considered and attended to.

While some smaller organizations can't do this and need to hire talent from the outside, organizations who are really dedicated to building their own talent do this process periodically throughout the year.

I really encourage you to learn more about how your organization's talent process works. Processes are different in each organization, but they probably all have a couple things in common. I'm going to walk you through some of the key concepts and I have a cheat sheet of questions you can ask to learn more. Download The 16 Questions That Will Change How You Manage Your Career at fullpotentialrealized.com/talent.

A talent conversation generally centers around a few key points. It’s all about narrowing down the list of possible future leaders and investing in the development of those who have the best chance to succeed.

First, leaders want to know about each colleague’s performance. To what degree did s/he deliver on their objectives? To what degree did they behave in alignment with the values of the company? This is something that’s generally been covered in the performance review, so this is one aspect of the conversation that each employee is privy to. The rest are not typically discussed as openly.

Next up is potential. For potential, execs are attempting to predict if the employee in question can go to the next level above where they are now. Can they go two levels above? Could they go to the top of the organization? This is a subjective process, but typically there are researched criteria used to make it as objective and fair as possible.

For instance, a criteria that many companies use to identify high potentials is learning agility. This measures the degree to which an individual can quickly learn on the job that they're in, even if it's ambiguous and doesn’t have a lot of structure, and apply those lessons effectively to adapt in the next job. People who have that capability are often considered high potential because they can deal with more complexity and broader responsibilities.

Again, each company is different, so the key thing to find out is what your company values, how they determine who they believe to be high potential, and package your strengths accordingly.

Another focal point is do all the executives have good successors? A successor is somebody who's ready to step in should the executive suddenly leave. Maybe they win the lottery. Is there somebody ready to go tomorrow? Who will be ready if it happens in a year or two years from now? Or even three to five years?

It's an interesting inquiry to find out how people think about who their successor should be. Because somebody might be high potential and high-performing, but still not designated as a successor. And so what exactly does it take, and how do executives get their successors ready?

Ultimately, the successors are not usually chosen by the executives they will replace, who are often already gone by that point. But it's each executive's responsibility to prepare and socialize a of cadre future leaders who will be ready to lead effectively when needed.

Another thing that the leaders address is mobility. Are these emerging leaders staying in place right now and getting development with projects that stretch them, are they ready to move laterally to get a broader view of the organization, or are they ready to move up? For organizations with a broad footprint - are they willing to move to another location to take on a new role?

And what should the timing be for all these moves? The logistical part of figuring all this out for the company includes matching people's readiness to move laterally or up with available roles at the moment, so the needs of the business are being met while individuals' development needs are also addressed.

Finally there's the matter of calibration. Usually leaders start out by looking at their own people, and then when they get in the room together they start talking about each other’s team members. When one highlights a given employee’s accomplishments and shares their reasoning about why they gave a given rating (e.g., excellent or exceeds expectations), the rest have to make sure that level of contribution aligns with what they rated as excellent or exceeds.

So the whole group agrees in the end on where everybody belongs on the continuum based on the perceived relative value of each's performance/potential and how they all relate to each other.

That way, in the end they can come to agreement to invest the big development dollars in the people they think have the best chance of leading in the future. They'll also give those people more exposure and visibility.

Given all this, one question is how do you position yourself to be well regarded by these resource allocators. Another question is how do you drive your own development wherever you wind up on the list so that you get the lessons and experiences to build your own leadership capability no matter what.

I'd love to hear what you find out about how talent works in your organization. If you find the information in this post to be useful, please share it with a corporate woman you know who wants to move forward with greater ease and satisfaction.