THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT

My garden is an ever-evolving landscape. The Columbine is on the wane as the Peonies come into their own. My New Dawn climbing rose is the star. In organizational horticulture, every employee can have a flowering season and certain employees may standout among the rest.

You can nurture and grow your own executive service corps. For every top position, not just the CEO, there should be a plan in place to identify and develop more than one person who has the potential to succeed in both meanings of the word. The key to success in employee development programs is to secure executive level support for the process. Senior staff should outline the abilities his or her successor must have by determining the knowledge, skills and behavior required to succeed. The CEO should discuss this with top staff twice a year, and ask for regular updates on how each candidate is progressing.

In modest-sized organizations, employees will most likely be more concerned about getting the work done than developing the management talent pool. Second tier staff, below the very top levels of the organization, can be seeded by creating development plans for each internal candidate, consistent with the organization's needs, as well as with those of the individual. Realistically, each candidate may be at a slightly different point of development at any given time.

Draw on the top staff members’ organizational knowledge and experience to mentor potential successors, expanding candidates understanding of key issues and providing them with exposure to characteristics of leadership and management. If the mentor pool is too small, turn to other organizations or leaders for mentoring relationships -- doing so could mean more available mentors with greater diversity.

Just as you fertilize and rotate your flower pots in a window, educational programs and job rotation can help individuals flourish, moving them along the path to new opportunities. Formalizing a leadership development program has added benefits -- returns may include helping mediocre performers, close skill and ability gaps of staff and revitalize midcareer executives.

Final thoughts: All employees need to grow. Plus, everyone has to worry about being run over by the lawn mower. If you don’t have the right people in-house to promote at the right time, with forethought you can be better prepared to bring in talent from the outside.