Flexability | In business, build bench strength

One of my biggest learnings as a sports and business leadership coach is to make sure I develop deep bench strength – the fitness and strength of the players you have in reserve will stand you in good stead when you suddenly need to send in a replacement.

That’s been on display across our news feeds since President Joe Biden passed the baton to Vice President Kamala Harris and wished her well in the race to the presidential election in November. It’s probably fair to say she’s shown, since then, how ready to run she was.

Here’s my take on building bench strength in business: get in early! Keep an eye out for young colleagues – people in their first five years of work – who show potential and offer them the opportunity to develop leadership skills.

I’m not just talking about those who show that all-star quality that makes them stand out, I’m speaking of young people who show talent for sales and marketing, service delivery, finance, and collaboration.

To do this, the executive leader needs to have insight into who’s knocking it out of the ballpark in one or more of these skills, and the discernment required to take them aside and explore whether they are a strategic thinker who can see how all the five qualities (sales and marketing, service delivery, finance and collaboration) work together to build a successful company.

Invest in cross-functional training

When colleagues are new to the organization, they don’t need to cover all bases, they just need to show talent and aptitude for one. The rest is education and training – and that’s your call as the executive leader.

Once you’ve picked a crew of standouts who show talent in sales and marketing, service delivery, finance and collaboration, and you have discerned whether they are interested in developing muscle in the other areas, it’s time to up their game. This requires a delicate balancing act because you’ll take them out of their (and your!) comfort zones for cross-functional training.

Cross-functional training is essential in a leadership development plan. You want to be building leaders who have a broad view of what it takes to run a business successfully. Take me, for example. I will never be a financial whiz; my talent lies in people skills. But I can read a balance sheet – I had to do the work to strengthen that muscle and now I know enough to make sure that, as a business leader, I cover all bases. The stories of businesses that replace a CEO with another from outside – one who has neither grown up in the company nor developed broad skills – are legion. Many end miserably.

And what if you put effort into training young people, giving them a broad set of skills, and then they move on to another company? Let them, I say. You’ve still developed a great leader and given the business world someone who is on the ball and has the potential to make a mark in the big leagues. The trust and skills you will have developed will be good for business in general, the economy and the world. We need more, better leaders.

Chances are, however, that if you show interest in developing colleagues with potential, who know they have room to grow, they will stick with your team. What’s more, your efforts are unlikely to remain under the radar: you will probably start attracting ambitious talent. What’s not to like about that?

How to select young talent

While any sports coach will tell you that there is a level of intangible gut instinct that comes into play when you select team members, there are any number of skills- and aptitude-based assessments that can help you discover who has leadership potential – Myers-Briggs, Kolbe A Index, Enneagram, DiSC, CliftonStrengths and more. And, the chemistry of the team, how well they play together and challenge each other to get better through collaboration, is crucial to the overall success of the company.

One way to get out in front is to change the way you interview new hires slightly. Too often we look only at whether they’re fit for the job we want done. How about assessing their potential for promotion from the time the starting gun fires, rather than only the current role?

On top of that, executive leaders need to show up every day and take time to truly get to know team members. All this is time well spent on the future of the company. If you want to build a great company, it invest in your people.

You never know when an event or opportunity will present itself that requires you to call in a substitute quickly. Surely it’s better to know that you have, and are, building a strong bench? That way, when the goalposts suddenly move, your game plan will be full of options that have solid potential.