A few years ago I heard Jack Welch say that one of a CEO’s top pri­or­i­ties is to develop the organization’s future lead­ers. This makes so much sense yet I see so many lead­ers treat this as an after­thought or only address it in the con­text of suc­ces­sion plan­ning as their career draws to a close. Yet hav­ing an inten­tional plan to develop future lead­ers at all lev­els can have a pro­found impact on the long-term suc­cess of your orga­ni­za­tion.

Think about it this way — if some­thing were to hap­pen to you, would the rest of the orga­ni­za­tion be in dan­ger? Who would lead? Are they equipped? Most of the clients we coach who lead larger orga­ni­za­tions are very inten­tional with this.

Some man­date that every exec­u­tive must iden­tify and inten­tion­ally develop their No. 2. They will often move their future lead­ers from role to role for peri­ods of time to increase their over­all under­stand­ing of the busi­ness. They invest heav­ily in edu­cat­ing and coach­ing these leaders.

There are few com­pa­nies or depart­ments that are too small for this. Decades fly by faster than most of us want to admit. We do our­selves, those we serve and those we lead well by mak­ing the devel­op­ment of our future lead­ers a real priority.

And the real ben­e­fit that comes from this is that when those we lead grow, it frees us up to grow and enables us to become even more effec­tive leaders.

Related posts:

1. 3 Non-Negotiable Dis­ci­plines for Leaders
2. 8 Steps to Increase Your Lead­er­ship Capac­ity (Series)
3. Get Rid of Your Job (Increas­ing Your Lead­er­ship Capac­ity Series — Step 7 of 8)
4. A Sim­ple Process for Coach­ing Your Team
5. Know Your Hand­ful (Increas­ing Your Lead­er­ship Capac­ity Series — Step 8 of 8)

Tags: Executive Team, Leadership

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