This article is NOT about our usual – Succession Planning - but rather it’s about one of the things you really have to think about before your company starts succession planning.

And that is: How do you define “leader” in your organization?

When I speak, I always start my presentations with the question: What does a leader look like? I flip-chart the responses, then ask my audience to “step back” and look at the list.

I ask them: Can you give this list a label? Is there a theme?

I see lightbulbs go off over people’s heads: Oh, these are behaviors or characteristics.

I point out that we talk about “leadership skills” and the need to teach people leadership skills… but the lists almost never contain skills!

Let’s look at the leadership “skill” of ethics.

We expect our leaders to behave ethically, don’t we? But when do we ever teach ethical behavior? It’s kind of a hard thing to teach, right? “Ethics” is more like an internal motivation or mindset. As a society, we are shocked when a “leader” behaves unethically, but we never teach ethics as a skill, do we? (Yes, some executive leadership programs include this topic, but rarely does typical schooling or training address it because it’s hard to teach a behavior!)

Another interesting wrinkle is this: the concept of ethics could be different for every company. If you run a manufacturing firm, ethical behavior can be very different from, say, a hospital and what ethics means in that setting. In a manufacturing firm, you don’t have to deal with the concept of ethics too often. But in a healthcare environment, ethical behavior can come down to every individual patient, every day.

When it comes to defining leadership, we can’t say “these are the behaviors we expect of our leaders,” without further defining what those behaviors actually look like in practice.

And every company needs to define that for themselves.

Why?

Because you can’t “raise up” leaders internally or hire them externally if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

So here is a starter list of leadership behaviors.

These have been collected from presentations that I’ve given in just the last year.

It’s amazing how long the list is! It confirms that “leadership” is wide-ranging.

When I ask clients, Tell me what a leader in your organization looks like, tell me how they are defined, so that we can create more of them, or find more of them, they are generally dumbfounded. They just haven’t thought about it before. While the list I’ve offered is a good start, you have to be more definitive about what these words mean for your organization.

Generally, leadership teams are not united on the definitions of “leader” because no one has ever asked them to have this discussion.  Here’s a great analogy: Ask three people to describe the same color. One will say “teal,” another “aqua” and the third “blue-green.”  They all know what that term means in their own heads… but they aren’t in agreement, are they?

I’m prompting you to have this discussion with your senior leadership team.

Conduct a “brainstorm-like” meeting and ask: What does a leader look like in this organization? How do they behave? How do we know they are behaving in a leader-like manner? What do we see?

Let’s circle back to how this relates to succession planning.

To conduct succession planning without this definition is futile. In order to develop employees into future leaders, you need to know what that means for your organization. In order to hire from outside your organization for a leadership role, you want to be confident they will be a fit with your culture and values.

To conduct succession planning without this definition is futile.

If that means leaders in this organization behave ethically, describe it:

·        Don’t lie

·        Don’t take bribes

·        Don’t operate behind other’s backs

·        Act without bias

·        Act without malice

·        Put the good of the company before one’s own needs or ambitions

So, start with the list I’ve supplied. Have your senior leaders work with it, discuss, and narrow it down to  5 - 6 leader behaviors from the list (or add your own), and then add 6 – 8 descriptions to define what each looks like in action. You don’t want more than 5 or 6 behaviors because it becomes too cumbersome; pick those that are most important for your organization to function repeatedly in the way that you want it to function.

Once you have these defined, you can start identifying and grooming future leaders who will continue to fit the culture of your organization.

This article was originally posted on LinkedIn.