Developing Leaders Faster
A client asked me how they could develop new leadership faster. It is a difficult question, and not one that I have seen answered in a systematic way. Yet it is probably the most important and most challenging hurdle facing progressive organizations that are attempting to scale up. Here are a few observations and things I might try.
The Fastest Way Means Relinquishing The Most Control
The more speed you want, the more you need to be willing to relinquish control over the work you are expecting people to do. To take an example from electoral campaigning, let’s say you want to make 10,000 contacts with infrequent voters to get them to turn out for an upcoming election. Most organizations will conduct this effort using a specific system and adhering to ironclad techniques. It will take time for someone to learn how to manage it in the precise way their employer desires. For the first month or two, someone will really be concentrating on learning your system. At the end of that time, what they will have illustrated to you is whether they can learn and stick to your system. They will not have demonstrated their leadership skills or prime-mover capacity.
If you want to test for those skills, then you will need to relinquish control. You might go so far as saying, "We need 10,000 get out the vote contacts in 2 months. Here's $50,000 to get it done. Talk to you in 2 months. Good luck." You'll have evaluated their leadership abilities far more comprehensively at the end of 2 months if that is the scenario.
That is not always possible. For various good reasons, you might need to retain control over message or technique. If so, then there is still room to set your people up in a way where you are getting a better evaluation of their leadership abilities and not just testing their ability to follow your protocols. But you will need to think it through carefully.
Overall, despite all of these challenges, I think that this is the best way to determine if someone has the skills to take on a leadership role in a department or campaign.
Management Skills Are Not Always The Same As Job Skills
Most organizations will promote someone into management who has demonstrated superior job skills. However, what that person has demonstrated is that they are a great lobbyist or fundraiser or telemarketer — not that they might be a great manager. If you want to test out whether someone might be appropriate for management, then the best way is to have them try managing something.
Management skills usually translate well across duties and content areas. Someone who can get 10,000 voter contacts with little more than a budget and a goal can often head up a fundraising division or a social media division, too. That person might need a little time to learn a new area, but they are usually equipped with the skills to manage something they may not have done before.
For example, in 2008, I managed 8 campaign offices in North Carolina that were registering new voters. We exceeded our goals, came in under budget, and created several new techniques for site-based voter registration that have been widely adopted by progressive organizations. I had never registered a voter before arriving in North Carolina, I did not register any voters while there, and to this day I have never registered someone to vote (aside from myself!). One could rightly criticize me for not getting some firsthand experience, but the point remains that management skills are usually not dependent on job skills.
If You Can, Create More Opportunities For More People To Succeed And Fail
If you have the financial resources, I would consider bringing on more people and then trying to create opportunities for them to demonstrate management skills. That is, instead of bringing on 10 people, bring on 12 or 13. Assign a goal and a budget, and see who possesses the creativity, self-direction, and resiliency to be a good manager. You do that to give yourself room for some to completely fail, because you are intentionally relinquishing an amount of control over how they get things done. You're basically trading off a few failures for one person who demonstrates the leadership skills you are seeking.
Promote Fast, Because Job Duties Skills Are Often Not The Same As Leadership Skills
You should promote fast. Partly, that goes back to the point that leadership skills are not the same thing as "following the manual" skills, nor are leadership skills necessarily the same thing as the skills needed to do the jobs the person is managing. If you see someone has leadership or management skills, then get the person into a leadership or management role so they can develop those skills rather than continuing to develop unrelated job skills.
Spend Time Defining What Leadership Looks Like For Your Organization
Spend time now defining what kind of person you would want to promote to leadership or have running a department or division in the future. It sounds a little tautological, but you will spend a lot of time looking for someone if you don't know who you're looking for. Further, your people need something to aim their efforts at if they would like to take on more responsibility. The more they know what they’re trying to become, the better directed their efforts at becoming it.
I would have good answers to questions like what are the characteristics of successful department heads at my organization? If I were evaluating the performance of a generic department head, what would be the three or four key metrics I would use? I would make all of this known to your staff. Ideally, they are hearing, “We want more leaders, and here is what that looks like in case you want to throw your hat in the ring.”