How to Identify and Nurture Emerging Leaders 

The people who look like leaders aren't necessarily the people who will become good ones.

Some of the best emerging leaders we've worked with weren't the loudest people in the room. They weren't necessarily chasing promotion. And they certainly didn't have all the answers. What they did have was a tendency to take responsibility.

• They noticed problems.
• They helped other people succeed.
• They asked good questions.
• And when something went wrong, they were more interested in what could be done next than whose fault it was.

If we want to find emerging leaders, perhaps we need to stop looking exclusively for leadership characteristics and start creating situations in which leadership behaviour can emerge.

Give People Something to Own

Leadership development starts well before someone has direct reports.

Give people genuine responsibility. Not responsibility where every decision still needs approval. Not a pretend project where the answer has already been decided. Something where their judgement matters. Then pay attention to what happens.

• Do they make decisions?
• Do they seek different perspectives?
• Do they communicate when things aren't going well?
• Do they take responsibility for the outcome?
• Most importantly, what do they do when there isn't an obvious answer?

We learn considerably more about someone's leadership potential when they have something meaningful to lose.

Look Beyond the Obvious Candidates

Organisations tend to notice certain people. They're confident. Articulate. Ambitious. Comfortable around senior leaders. Those aren't bad qualities. They're just not the same thing as leadership. Some emerging leaders are considerably quieter.

They might be the person others naturally ask for help. The person who raises the uncomfortable issue everyone else has avoided. The person who remains useful when a plan starts falling apart.

If our definition of leadership is too narrow, we'll keep developing different versions of the leaders we already have.

Let People Make Decisions

We cannot develop judgement without allowing people to use it. That means emerging leaders need decisions with consequences. Some will work. Some won't. The leadership opportunity exists in both.

When a decision doesn't work, our response matters. If every mistake results in authority being pulled back upwards, people quickly learn that the safest form of leadership is asking permission.

Instead, we can ask:

• What did we know at the time?
• What assumptions were we making?
• What changed?
• What would we do differently now?

The objective isn't to remove failure. It's to improve judgement.

Give Them Problems Outside Their Lane

It's relatively easy to make decisions when we understand all the variables. Leadership gets harder when we don't.

Cross-functional projects expose emerging leaders to competing priorities, unfamiliar problems and people who don't necessarily see the organisation the same way they do. That's useful. They begin to discover that the obvious solution from one department can create an entirely new problem for another.

That's where systems thinking starts to develop.

Give Them Access to Experience, Not Just Advice

Mentoring can be enormously valuable. But mentoring shouldn't become an experienced leader providing the answer every time someone encounters a difficult problem.

The better conversation is often:

• What are you seeing?
• What options have you considered?
• What do you think we should do?

Then experience can add context, challenge assumptions and expose blind spots without taking ownership of the decision. The goal isn't to create leaders who know what we would do. It's to develop leaders capable of deciding what they should do.

Watch What Happens Under Pressure

Leadership potential becomes considerably easier to see when things aren't going particularly well. Plans change. People disagree. Information is incomplete. Someone makes a mistake. A stakeholder wants something we can't deliver. These moments tell us far more than another leadership assessment ever could.

Who creates clarity?

• Who creates noise?
• Who takes responsibility?
• Who protects the team?
• Who asks for help?
• Who changes their mind when better information appears?
• And who somehow manages to make every problem somebody else's?

Pressure doesn't magically create leadership capability. But it has a habit of revealing what's already there.

Development Needs Feedback

Experience alone doesn't guarantee development.

We can repeat the same experience twenty times and simply become very experienced at doing something badly. People need the opportunity to reflect on what happened, understand the impact of their decisions and try again.

That means feedback needs to be specific enough to be useful.

Not: “You need to be more strategic.”

But: “We made the decision quickly, but we didn't involve Operations and they inherited most of the consequences. How might we approach that differently next time?”

That's something we can work with.

Don't Wait Until We Need Them

The worst time to discover we haven't developed enough leaders is when a senior person leaves. Succession isn't an HR exercise. It's something organisations either build into everyday work or discover they neglected when it becomes inconvenient.

If we want more capable leaders, we need to give people opportunities to lead before we desperately need them to.

• Give them responsibility.
• Let them make decisions.
• Expose them to complexity.
• Allow some of those decisions to be wrong.
• Give them useful feedback.
• Then give them another opportunity.

Because leadership potential is difficult to identify from the sidelines. Sometimes we have to give people enough room to show us what they're capable of.