Accelerate Your Succession Candidates at Lightning Speed
Are you hiring externally for succession plans due to internal candidates’ unpreparedness? How can you change the dynamic and hire from within?
Our top three recommendations to upskill your internal candidates:
Articulate Outcomes: Identify specific, measurable business outcomes that indicate readiness for each candidate and their proposed next role.
Intensively Upskill: Use a combination of hyper-personalized development content tailored to their unique needs, a confidential third-party executive coach, and on-the-job behavior change.
Make Final Call: Conduct frequent assessments and 360-degree feedback loops to ensure the right candidates are ready to take on the new role in months, not years.
How do you upskill your managers in a meaningful way?
From years of behavioral research and experience in developing talent, here’s our top piece of advice:
Focus on Business Impact First
Sounds simple, right? But what does this actually entail?
Let’s examine the traditional model. With good intentions, you might decide that your senior leader candidate could benefit from executive coaching to advance their career. You hire an executive coach and pinpoint specific leadership attributes needing improvement for the candidate to secure that next significant role.
However, what often occurs? The coach and the candidate, both well-meaning, work together to enhance skills such as decisiveness and executive presence. While you may notice minor changes in the candidate’s behavior and receive positive feedback from the coach, senior leaders may still be unconvinced that the candidate is ready for promotion without clear, demonstrated outcomes.
The method of upskilling is just as crucial as the content itself. It’s imperative that your training connects directly to specific leadership outcomes and business impacts. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Our Recommendation
Stop focusing solely on skills or competencies. Instead, prioritize the business impact by considering the candidate’s challenges, opportunities, or potential stretch assignments. For example, you might assign a project that requires the candidate to unite two divisions, but they might express uncertainty, saying,
- “I’m not sure how to gain quick buy-in and alignment to the new approach.”
Alternatively, you may have recently placed the candidate in a struggling team, hoping they can turn things around.
Each challenge or stretch assignment is unique, so it’s essential to deliver a hyper-personalized upskilling experience that addresses the topic.
Ultimately, you can measure the results: for example,
- “Two teams aligned within six weeks, and productivity is back on track!”
- “We’ve made significant progress on retention; there have been no resignations in the past two months, and people are stepping up to take on stretch assignments!”
Additionally, the candidate has demonstrated greater decisiveness and executive presence throughout the process. And, yes, the candidate has shown more decisiveness and executive presence in the process.
Learning & Development is often seen as discretionary. The answer? Prioritize business impact.
“We applied this new approach to quickly promote a VP who demonstrated readiness for her new role in only three months! Now, we have promoted her instead of looking to the outside. “
MEET Michael: CTO, 29 years experience
“Emily is a talented VP with a bright future, and we want to promote her to an SVP position in six months. However, she needs to demonstrate some skills which may take too long to develop. We prefer to promote internally to avoid losing her, so how can we invest in her growth and quickly get her ready?”
Micheal with his HR Business Partner championed Emily’s journey by sponsoring her in Gotara’s Booster Program, setting the stage for her rapid development. The leadership team collaborated with Gotara to conduct a comprehensive assessment, pinpointing the specific gap and goal Emily needed to achieve for her promotion.
With Gotara’s neuroscience-based appraoch and her confidential one-on-one coach Emily boldly chose four senior leadership skills: Create a Shared Vision & Strategy, Drive Impactful Change, Facilitate & Inspire Innovation, and Make the Tough Calls, which she embraced and applied immediately in her role.
The results? Three months later, Emily successfully united two large teams, rallying them around a shared vision that ignited their passion and commitment and boosted innovation by 20%. She elevated her teams and boldly decided to bring work back in-house from an underperforming vendor, emphasizing the strength of ownership and quality. Her promotion to SVP even came early!
Gotara Works
UP TO97%
of participants retained
UP TO76%
of participants had their careers accelerated within the 1st year
94%
of participants rate a 20-80% improvement on specific skills
94%
of participants made Moderate to Significant advancements towards their goal
Ready to accelerate your succession candidates at lightning speed?
