Succession: The Proof

Over the last two weeks, I've laid out the trap that catches your best experts at 'Head of' level, and the identity shift it takes to free them.

So let's finish on the thing you really care about. Does it work, and how would you know?

Here's what it looks like when someone truly makes the shift.

They stop being the busiest person in the building. The firefighting calms down, not because there are fewer fires, but because they've finally built a team that can deal with them. They spend their time on the things only they can do. Where's the business going? Who needs developing? What matters most this quarter?

Their team changes too. Good people stop leaving, because they're finally being trusted to do their jobs. The people around them grow faster, because someone is developing them rather than constantly redoing their work. Help that leader change, and a whole team feels it.

Suddenly people see them differently. They are invited into senior conversations they used to be left out of. Not because they got cleverer overnight, but because they carry themselves like a leader now instead of a technician. They have a new level of gravitas and influence and an elevated value in the organisation.

I've seen it again and again. The head chef who stopped running the kitchen and started running the business. The specialist who went from being the bottleneck to being the person their peers came to for a steer. The high performer stuck for years who then moved two levels in eighteen months.

So how do you measure that the development that creates this shift is working? I'll be honest, it isn't easy. Most development evaluation measures the wrong stuff. Did people turn up? Did they enjoy it? Did they rate the facilitator? None of that tells you a thing about impact.

The real measures are tougher. Are they getting promoted? Are their people getting promoted? Has retention in their team improved? Are the projects they lead actually delivering something you can point at? But all of these require your people measurement processes to be robust in the first place. In some cases our work with clients starts with helping them to build the right measures before we build the programmes themselves.

The programmes I've built have run promotion rates of 50 to 70 per cent per cohort, with embedded projects that paid back the whole investment many times over. I'm proud of that.

So here's where I'll pull this series of articles to a close. Right now, somewhere in your business, there are talented people stuck in the trap. They are capable of far more than their role is letting them give. Their potential isn't in question. The only question is whether anyone is doing the right work to unlock it.

If that's a gap you'd like to close, it's exactly what we do, and I'd love to work with you.