Unleashing leadership potential

Mathieu Baril provides some tips on how to surface, activate and accelerate leadership potential in expertise-based firms

Until artificial intelligence replaces many of us, expertise-based firms in fields such as engineering, technology, finance and accounting will continue to rely on highly educated and talented individuals with specialized skills to accomplish their visions, service their clients and, ultimately, make money. Their ability to take on emerging challenges and lead initiatives across levels and functions drives strategy execution in our ever-accelerating world.

A challenge many firms face is that the best people at their respective crafts tend to come in limited supply, and while they are valuable in their roles, they are also eager to grow and expand their horizons. They typically achieve this through increasingly complex and rewarding engagements, as well as through opportunities to evolve in a leadership capacity in one form or another.

A challenge many firms face is that the best people at their respective crafts tend to come in limited supply

While not every savvy and ambitious technical expert has the same amount of potential to become a great manager or executive, there is an increasing recognition that potential to demonstrate leadership is not exclusive to just a few special individuals. In fact, enabling professionals to recognize and grow their potential is always a winning bet for organizations seeking to instill a culture of ownership and performance, broaden their leadership bench, and maximize retention.

For expertise-based firms, the challenge of unleashing leadership potential is often further exacerbated by the following:

• A common belief that growth (career and income) necessarily comes through formal leadership responsibilities; in reality, many organizations also offer rewarding technical career paths (such as managing increasingly complex engagements, new solutions design and launches; lateral moves in business development; or functional area SME practice lead roles).
• Flatter client-centric organizations often require work to be completed by projectbased or agile teams, requiring individuals in every role to step up their ownership and demonstrate leadership behaviours. These team-based structures don’t necessarily entail an ‘official’ leader role, but always require people to care about common outcomes, bring the best out of others and proactively get things done.
• Because time really is money, firms can’t easily remove individuals from active projects to redeploy them on timeconsuming development initiatives. Therefore, any solution needs to be highly efficient and scalable.

In addition to these factors, larger organizations need to account for geographical dispersion, varied yet deep specializations, often-decentralized execution structures and a large employee base at the professional level. These variables make it difficult to design and roll out relevant global practices to identify and develop those with the most potential for leadership.

While larger usually also means more complex, a question typically emerges for all expertise-based firms: How can you generate more leadership and prioritize and accelerate relevant development with such a diverse audience without over-engineering the solution?

Straightforward steps make the difference

There are some straightforward steps you can take to help generate positive momentum for these professionals and the companies for which they work. At the heart of the solution is building awareness, empowering people, catalyzing development earlier in careers and enabling individuals to actualize their potential for demonstrating leadership in one form or another. These steps include:

1. Surface potential
Professionals interested in exploring if and how leadership can be part of their career first require self-awareness, an understanding of what it means to be a leader and a sense of their potential to grow in this direction. These questions typically start to emerge after a few years of experience, and the more proactively these answers can be provided, the better.

While many personality tests provide self-awareness, some organizations we work with have started leveraging an advanced online tool that integrates both psychometric assessment (personality) and leadership simulation (skills) to more accurately assess all critical variables of someone’s leadership potential. Results are provided in a way that builds a sense of ownership about how one can achieve, lead and grow in today’s fast-evolving world. By leveraging such a scalable tool, organizations can cast a wider net and achieve earlier detection of leadership potential.

2. Activate potential
To build awareness, some organizations generate bottom-up interest and focus for individuals considering if and how they should invest energy to grow in a leadership track versus a more technical one. This helps build ownership and self-driven momentum as the individuals gain clarity about which career direction will be most rewarding and aligned with their motivations and chances of success.

This early triage based on leadership potential also helps reduce the risks of frustration, career derailment and wasted time for everyone involved. Very little resources have been invested at this point, and parties emerge in a better position to prioritize efforts moving forward. In addition, talent management leaders have become equipped with unparallelled insight on leadership potential on a whole new scale.

Arguably more important, empowering professionals with a clear understanding of their profiles, as well as insight into what they can do about it, catalyzes them to demonstrate leadership more consistently, regardless of their job titles. The result is bottom-up, decentralized momentum for an evolving culture of personal ownership and accountability.

3. Accelerate potential
With a greater appetite for growth and energy building, the next piece of the equation is to support individuals with opportunities to learn and enable growth through action. The key is to avoid over-engineering what happens next. Effective and empowering coaching conversations, along with rewarding individuals who demonstrate ownership and try new things, typically pay massive dividends in terms of engagement, retention of top talent, strengthening the leadership bench and shaping a high-performance culture.

In sum, organizations that are most successful at unleashing their full potential for performance are those that empower individuals to surface, activate and accelerate growth across the broadest possible audience. While they invest in the next generation of people leaders, they strategically broaden the distribution of leadership behaviours so that the entire employee base gets energized to evolve into the best possible version of itself.

Mathieu Baril is manager of business development at DDI Canada. To find out more information about DDI’s leadership expertise, email [email protected].