For years, when there was a need for a new leader, organizations looked to the best widget makers and promoted them. The thought process was that if you were technically good at your job, you could teach others to perform at the same level of productivity. For years, management consultants were advising that a strong employee would not be an effective leader. The thinking was that you would lose a great worker bee and inherit a bad manager.
In 1995, a newly coined concept was popularized by Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. Goleman stated that across all jobs, cognitive intelligence and technical skills were only 33% of what would lead to success while 66% was one’s emotional intelligence. When he looked at leadership, that former dropped to just 15% while the latter jumped to 85%.
For the greater part of my 25 years in business, I have been working with emerging/potential leaders in both training sessions and with individual coaching clients. Proactive employers identify employees whom they want to prepare for a leadership opportunity before that role even materializes. For this, we identify the people skills that they will need to be most successful. We use one of the assessments in the Everything DiSC® Suite. This will help prepare a pipeline of internal candidates for the near future of 6-12 months when an opportunity may arise, expected or unexpected.
“Leaders have followers, managers have employees. Managers make widgets, leaders make change.” – Seth Godin