3 Steps for Growing Design Leaders Into Senior Roles That Set Them Up For Success
Want to know the secret to growing your leadership pipeline?
As a design executive who puts a focus on talent growth, having a pipeline is vital for long-term success. The answer is through development in place. It’s the crucial piece that many leaders miss when thinking about top talent and succession planning.
How do you know someone’s not developing their people?
When there’s a huge knowledge or experience gap between them and the next level down. When someone leaves from their team and they can’t fill the role internally from the next group of leaders. There are intentional reasons for external hires, especially with new leadership or to embed specific capabilities, but if it’s a pattern throughout the org there’s a development gap.
So how do you fix it?
#1 — Identify candidates for every critical role — look across the organization, not just within that leader’s bench.
You’ll find that some of the best talent are in a different team or domain.
Once you’ve looked far and wide to assess what talent could step into that role, make a list of the candidates. Do this for every critical role. This is the garden you’re going to invest in and water.
It’s one of the best uses of your time and effort.
#2 — Map out how many development opportunities are needed for each person to take that next role.
Many people think of readiness in timeframes (months or years), but if you want an agile, high-performance organization you need to think in experiences.
What experiences do they need to have to be ready to take that next role and be successful? It may be bigger scope or leading a global team, or it may be delivering a cross-divisional program or shipping a v1 product. Sometimes it’s the crucible experience of turning an underperforming team around.
Once you start listing out what’s needed, the development gap you need to close will be obvious.
#3 — Put the plan to work, and continue to look for stretch opportunities for your talent.
When you have invested time in the process, you’ll start to look at new opportunities differently, thinking through who may be the best to take them on outside of your leadership table.
Development in place is a practice that creates a steady pipeline of internal talent, and delivers on one of the biggest things people want — an investment in their professional development. It’s a process that yields benefits well beyond succession planning, by increasing organizational health, and developing a learning culture. If you put this framework into practice, you will reduce the experience gap between each of the levels in your organization.
Over time, you’ll have multiple internal candidates for roles instead of being forced to only looking internally. And you’ll have top talent eager and ready to take on their next role in your organization.
If you’re interested in diving deeper into design leadership, experience-led culture, and the future of work, check out my intermittent newsletter: kobewan.substack.com.
