Step-by-step Guide to Develop and Track Your Internal Leadership Bench

If you’re hiring great people with leadership potential, their development should start when they are ready, not when the next manager role becomes available.

Without a standardized Team Lead program, we develop and track our internal leadership bench using the below Leadership Preparedness Guide (LPG). It's available for any Account Executive to work on with their manager, which provides a clear map for skill development and a trackable tool for leadership to follow along with our internal bench of future candidates.

Here is a step-by-step guide on how to create an LPG, which can be used with or without a Team Lead program.

Step 1: Poll your existing leaders (and their leaders) on what makes them successful in their role

The initial goal is to identify the core competencies required to do the job well. We asked all our leaders and their leaders to submit 5-10 skills necessary for their teams’ success, and then we grouped those responses into defined categories. Revising a few times for redundancies, we landed on 12 Core Competencies: 8 “Human Skills” and 4 “Technical Skills”.?We define each one for complete clarity.

Examples of human skills

Step 2: Create an experience bank

Since the main purpose of this tool is to develop Account Executives into leaders, the development part is providing them opportunities to learn these competencies while in their current roles. For each competency, we list tactical recommendations for ways they can learn or showcase their skills in their day-to-day role. We also provide book recommendations for each competency, since that is commonly requested.

Example of Experience Bank

Step 3: Provide examples of interview questions

Why be secretive about the interview process? We include 3 possible interview questions for each competency in the LPG.?It’s still up to them to provide profound answers with supporting examples and stories. ??The point is to get them thinking about their experiences and how they can translate those lessons to their future team.

Examples of Interview Questions

Step 4: Track development

It’s important to have a baseline for all the competencies, so the Account Executive and their manager are on the same page about what skills need to be developed and how. We designed a heat map tracker for this purpose to be updated monthly.?There is also a master tracker used amongst leadership to track the development of the overall bench.?This helps with visibility for Account Executives who don’t get a lot of interaction with other leaders, and for leaders to quickly gauge who is most prepared for the next open interview process.

?Example of Competency Tracker

It goes without saying this LPG is only a small part of the actual developmental process. It takes a committed, talented front-line leadership team to execute the strategy and a top-down culture of taking development seriously. If you feel like you have those things, this process can help serve as the framework to build a better leadership bench, and if you feel like you don't, this process might be more important than ever.

We all benefit from better-coached humans in the world. Good luck!

Related article: Level Up Your Sales Team by Eliminating the Team Lead Role