About 75% of employees report that their boss is the worst and most stressful part of their job. And, to make matters worse, 85% of executives aren’t confident in their leadership pipelines!
As you work to build a strong leadership pipeline for your organization and select candidates for leadership training, have them do these three tasks to see if they’re truly qualified for real leadership roles.
1. Lead a Team
If you really want to get a feel for how your candidates will lead, give them an opportunity to lead a team for a small project. Great leaders are easily able to delegate tasks to the appropriate members on their teams. They don’t micromanage employees or try to do everything themselves. Instead, they provide clear expectations and assign specific tasks to the team members best suited to complete them, focusing on each team member’s strengths and talents.
They also inspire their team members to do great work, be innovative, stay engaged, and motivate one another. And they relish opportunities to coach their team members when necessary but are never condescending or dictatorial. Monitor your candidates as they lead their teams to see what they do and if they do some or most of the things mentioned here.
2. Role-Play
To really gain insight into how candidates will behave in stressful situations they’ll encounter once they’re in leadership roles, have them participate in multiple mock role-playing sessions that mimic real-life scenarios they’ll encounter. In one role-playing session, you can conduct a scenario where you act as a difficult employee whom the candidate must manage or convince to do something they really don’t want to do.
Pay attention to how they handle the overall situation. Are they empathetic and persuasive while remaining professional? And in another role-playing session, you can act as an irate customer or difficult business partner who isn’t cooperative. How do they engage the challenging individual? Are they able to sustain a professional relationship while completing the business task at hand?
3. Complete a Project or Task They Don’t Know How to Do
When asking candidates to complete tasks they don’t know how to do, observe their overall approaches and attitudes. Leaders will seek out answers and help from other resources when necessary. They won’t clam up or get frustrated. Instead, they will remain focused and try their hardest to figure out how to complete their assigned tasks.
Be sure to make tasks within their capability, however, to remain fair and reasonable. For instance, you wouldn’t want to ask an accounting manager to code a portion of a technology platform. But it would be reasonable to ask such candidates to conduct some form of advanced financial analysis or projections that they don’t do every day.
Assess your leadership candidates by asking them to do the three things mentioned above, and you’ll be one step closer to building a strong pipeline of leaders for your organization.