Looking beyond the Performance Review for your next leaders

A mistake that many businesses make is to ignore or dismiss an employee’s leadership potential based on their current job performance, and focus instead on the perceived highest performers who may not actually have the ability to manage and lead a team or implement and deliver on strategy. Employees with skills such as the ability to work well under pressure, great communications skills, motivation and a real passion to progress further should be identified as they may be the future leaders of your organization.

To identify employees with genuine leadership potential, managers will need to look beyond what their current results may indicate, and assess their real performance potential in a future role. Some important factors to consider are:

• Assessing the employee’s motivation– a simple but often overlooked measure is to ask if the individual is actually interested in moving into a leadership role. Does the employee want career progression and leadership development – if they don’t actually want it, and would rather be comfortable and high performing in their current role, then there is no point in promoting them. Sometimes they may be best left in their current role.
• Behaviour– exhibiting the desired corporate behaviours for your industry/business, having good communication skills, maturity and an ability to motivate others are all important.
• Potential– not all high performers have high potential!

So take the time to really know your employees, not just from their current performance review, but from their potential performance review.