When to Start Grooming Your Leaders

As a leadership consultant/coach I have often said (and blogged) that leadership begins with the most junior persons in your organization. If they are taught to do their job correctly and are given the tools needed to perform their roles then they can begin to experience what good leadership looks like and gives them something to model. I truly believe that.

Some organizations even take the next step and assign each employee a mentor. This is a good thing for the junior employee. In theory, this gives that junior employee a senior person that can help them navigate the organization, their career path, and allow them to voice concerns and other issues in a friendly environment. In my experience, though, I have rarely seen this work as it was intended. The person that is assigned as the mentor has his/her own issues and they are more often than not too busy, and either intentionally or unintentionally soon forget that they are supposed to be mentoring someone. That junior person often times doesn’t want to feel like pest so they don’t approach their mentor and the great idea fizzles.

The usual next step occurs when a person might receive some sort of coaching is after being moved into a VP or other “C” level role. Those that are fortunate are sometimes provided an executive coach to help them transition into the next level of the leadership food chain. This occurs in organizations that invest in their people and their businesses.

But I submit that there is a better time to invest in your future leaders (aside from when they start). I believe that when a person is moved up into their first supervisory role as a Senior Manager (there’s that word again), Project/Project Manager, or the Director level is the time to invest in them by providing them a coach.

Leadership is leadership, but the type of work a consultant/coach would do for an entry level supervisor/Director would focus, in part, on separate areas of this transition into leadership than it would for a VP or higher. This is their first foray into the leadership arena. This is where it is critical for that person to have guidance as they shift the types of responsibilities they bear. And in this first transition, an investment into the success of the new leader will have a more positive effect on the success of the organization.

So when should we start grooming our leaders? We should be grooming them from their first day on the job. But the time for more investment into them should come when they are moved into their first leadership role, not the one two to three levels up.