In the modern business world, effective leadership is crucial. This is true not only for large organisation, but for small businesses. As SMEs strive to stay ahead of the curve throughout their growth, a robust leadership pipeline becomes imperative. Here, we look at the essential components of building a leadership pipeline in a small business.
What Is A Leadership Pipeline?
Simply put, creating a leadership pipeline means proactively identifying and grooming those who could be future leaders within your SME. There are certain useful rules to follow when it comes to creating a robust pipeline in order to secure the future of your business, even after you no longer work in it.
Rule 1 – Identify Leadership Potential
The first thing to do is to identify those within your business that have leadership potential early on. Going through a thorough assessment of employees’ skills, competencies, and aspirations will help you identify potential candidates, but it is important to look beyond their current job performance and consider abilities such as strategic thinking, adaptability, and interpersonal skills.
Rule 2 – Building a Framework
When you have identified potential leaders, you will need to create a framework to support their development. Providing them with a mix of experiences that broaden their skill set and allow them to operate in different parts of the business will be extremely beneficial. On-the-job learning, mentoring, and formal training can be combined to help create well-rounded leaders.
Rule 3 – Mentorship
Mentorship has a pivotal role in leadership development. Pairing your identified candidates with experienced mentors/leaders who can provide guidance, share insights, and offer constructive feedback can accelerate their development. It can also provide useful proof to other employees that you are working on their behalf.
Rule 4 – Succession Planning
A robust leadership pipeline needs to include succession planning. An SME that has identified which roles are critical and prepared those who want to step into these positions when the time comes is a business that will not fall when a member of staff retires or leaves or throughout periods of change..
Rule 5 – Creating a Leadership Culture
It is essential that a business that wants to succeed embodies a culture that values and prioritizss leadership development. This can not only encourage employees at all levels to aspire to leadership roles, but can help improve the diversity within your business. Diverse teams can bring a huge range of benefits to an SME, and could help to identify areas for future development that may not have been previously considered.
Evaluating Leadership Development
While setting up a leadership pipeline is a job that might take some time, you will need to return to your framework to make adjustments sometimes. Carefully establish metrics for measuring progress, early on, and this will allow you to make changes if something isn’t working quite so well as it should.
Investing in leadership isn’t just a strategy. Developing a leadership pipeline means you have put in long-term investment to secure the success and sustainability of your business.
