Improving Leadership Bench Strength

When it comes to leadership bench strength, some companies have benches that are hazardously light, while some companies have more depth. When you have light bench strength, you are lacking the capacity needed to sustain or grow your business beyond its present level. When you depend on the same managers and leaders year after year without ever fully developing new prospects, you will unexpectedly lose key staff members that you were probably counting on, but never actually strategically incorporated into new positions. You must concentrate on developing your staff, putting the right players in the right positions, producing results, and demonstrating that your team has the agility and flexibility to consistently step up to new tasks, new leadership roles, and new responsibilities. Some research indicates that approx 1 out of 5 people expect to leave their current position within the next year. Most managers spend 4-5 years in a given position; some only spend 2-3 years in their role before they begin looking at new opportunities. These numbers are similar for each level of employee, so having bench strength is essential for improving performance.

Here are some ways to help build strength:

Cross-Train – Having a staff that is well cross-trained and agile directly influences your bench strength. Providing cross-departmental learning will give employees and managers more exposure, and will allow them to gain better knowledge of your organization as a whole system. This permits leaders to move personnel around to help support the needs of the customer, because their staff is well-rounded and not just one job specific.

Assess Talent – Assess your managers’ leadership skills, behaviors, and work ethic. Do the same for all your employees. When you clearly understand their current levels, you have more insight on how to help them increase effectiveness – you have a vision on what they need to work on and what they have mastered. Then begin to transfer the knowledge and experience from level to level. Capture the current state of the team, and apply the education, training, and mentoring needed to develop your future leaders.

Identify and Nurture High-Potential Leaders – Focus more on the employees possessing the strong capabilities, but also on the members who fall below the mark at which you wish them to operate. These are the two areas of people that will mostly likely leave an organization. Do not allow your high potential leaders to feel isolated where they are, but instead build their relationships. Help these leaders to team up with others and strengthen the interpersonal relationships across your enterprise. Help them guide the folks operating under the radar to gain stronger capabilities, learn new talents, and improve their daily output, channeling them to constructively strengthen their value.

Provide Mentoring/Training – Staff can benefit by having stronger support channels. Mentoring and coaching programs will help employees gain confidence and directly influence the development of the workforce. Finding new and fresh approaches to help your team learn is invaluable. Make your mentoring programs and training programs stand for something, and stress the importance of such programs to your team. If they see that training reflects on growth opportunities in your organization, more will be serious about it.

Job Leveling – An organization chart of your company is a useful tool that can show the company’s structure and the relationships between the employees and the jobs with which they are charged. The main purpose of this formal chart is to reflect the authority arrangement of the company; however, it often only reflects the responsibility structure. With such dynamic change in today’s business, the company’s organization chart is often out of date only weeks after updating with its new employees, new managers, and possibly new billets. One thing that an organization chart does show is the company’s formal relationships and allows customers to see where they can turn if an employee is not readily available or able to assist. But what it does not do is discuss any of the social relationships that develop from it. Understanding the direct line relationship between a manager and the subordinate is important, but having this serve as a “Hierarchy” can be dangerous. Having a flat line organization is more effective and more modern. An administrative “chain of command” is important for such things as vacation requests, timesheet approval, etc…but having it serve as the “pecking order” in your business can be misleading. Communicating the purpose of an organization chart is important – many employees may read to far into that one diagram and become discouraged. One-line your team and keep the focus on customers, not supervisors.

Take a look at the improvements that you would like to see in your organization and what can enable you to be a better team. What is your philosophy on leadership, what are the skills critical for success, and what do you value most in your team? As you spend time answering these questions, think about having a more agile workforce – a team that is cross-trained and well developed, as well as an organization that that has made a commitment to raise the bar for each individual, so at any given time, any one of them can step up to new challenges. Build your bench strength by providing quality mentoring and training, identifying potential new leaders, and assessing current skill levels. People are always ready to step up, they are anxious for new opportunities. Do not let people stay on your bench too long, get them out onto the field and allow them to exhibit the qualities they possess to help improve the company’s performance.