The following outline, adapted to your own needs and values, will allow you to design a plan to identify potential future leaders and to develop their potential into excellence.

1. Identify what’s important. Most executives think they know leadership potential when they see it, but are hard-pressed to define its characteristics. Use a combination of assessments to bank information about your people, including your current leadership. Measure the characteristics important in the way they think, how they act and what their interests are. Those characteristics are not easily changed and you probably will not have the resources to develop someone who lacks a key characteristic. You need to know what you have to work with in your existing pool and whether you must look outside to find potential leaders for tomorrow.
   
   Measure their skills, too. Using a 360 degree assessment of leadership skills will tell you how much work you have to do, once you have a candidate for development.
    
2. Build your “pool of possibles.” The time to bring future leaders on board is now, or sooner! When you’re thirsty, it’s terribly late to begin digging a well. Plan for long-term succession to leadership positions. Assume some of your possibles will not get there, or will leave before the process is complete.
    
3. Bring your potential leaders on board early. It may take years for an employee to thoroughly understand what makes your company and its culture tick. Provide opportunities for developing leaders to participate in high-level thinking and decision-making. Give them real chances to spread their wings and perhaps even fall and bump their heads. Learning to lead is not a linear process and a bit of pain is woven into the experience of most successful leaders.
    
4. Pick them up when they fall. To learn from a fall, most of us need help understanding what happened and realize that we need not fear falling! Offer an internal mentor or a professional coach, or both, to help your leaders develop more quickly and surely. A good coach can cut years off the time it takes to learn to fly and make sure falls are not fatal, just a little painful.
    
5. Reward them for developing. You’re asking exceptional people to work exceptionally hard and to accomplish exceptional goals. While most high-potential leadership candidates will be internally motivated to excel, they will also expect to be rewarded for their efforts and their growth. Too many businesses have watched a potential star develop within, only to watch them depart for greener pastures, feeling unrewarded and unappreciated in their old home. Make sure they know where they are headed, but don’t save all the goodies for when they get there.
    
6. It’s a process, not a place. While the current crop of leadership candidates is pursuing their development, continue looking for the next ones — you will never discover you have too many!

Continued growth and natural attrition among tellers (many have moved up to new positions in the organization) now provides an opportunity to hire new employees to fill teller positions. So management requested a new look at the characteristics which differentiate between truly “Top Performers” and others who do their jobs adequately, but do not excel.

A differential study was undertaken, with the first task being identification of a group of existing “Top Performers” and a group of “Bottom Performers.” Performance rankings were first obtained with a set of available internal metrics. The groupings were then validated with managers’ forced-choice rankings, insuring members of both groups were appropriately sorted by “hard data” and also consensus choices for appropriate grouping according to managers’ perceptions of performance.

Three assessment tools were then administered to all members of both groups: The Profile XT™, a comprehensive job fit measure; the Customer Service Perspective™, a job fit measure designed to assess characteristics important in customer service; and the Profile Sales Indicator™, a job fit measure designed to assess characteristics important in sales jobs. For each assessment, a match pattern was created for each of the two groups and the patterns were then mapped on a single graph, shown below. Pattern areas exclusive to Top Performers are shown in green, those exclusive to Bottom Performers are mapped in scarlet and the areas where the patterns overlapped are shaded yellow. The red arrows indicate characteristics clearly separating the two groups.

Note: No graph is presented for the Customer Service Perspective™ as the measure showed very little difference between the characteristics of the two groups. Management suggested this lack of separation might be evidence of the very compressed range of customer service characteristics to which applicants are recruited and selected in this highly service-oriented industry and organization. The sales characteristics and more general characteristics of applicants are not as uniformly selected in recruiting and hiring.

In distilling the characteristics of top performing tellers, the assessments lead us to the following:

Top Performers tend to be:

• Higher Energy
• More Assertive
• More Manageable
• More Optimistic
• More Decisive
• More Objective
• More Competitive
• More Persistent
• More Driven to Sell

In addition, Top Performers’ primary occupational interests are in the areas of People Service, Enterprising and Creative occupations. Bottom Performers share the interest in People Service, but are more interested in Technical and Financial/Admin occupations.

With this information in hand and a well-developed “Top Performer” success pattern on two assessments, the credit union has embarked on recruiting and hiring for their open teller positions with a clear goal in mind: add “Top Performers” to their teller ranks and continue to build their competitive “slight edge!”

Problem: Recently I read through a thread of emails regarding a service matter. The client was concerned about the tone an employee had used when responding to the client. I didn’t find anything too alarming until I came to the last paragraph of the email. That was the paragraph that started emails “blasting” back and forth!

Point: Read your email carefully. How will it be interpreted? Never use bold or caps, unless you intend to “yell.” It’s better to use quotations or italicize the words or phrase. If you’re upset, wait before responding.

“The wise man reads in the morning the letter he wrote overnight.” - Anonymous