Now that you have identified the employees to develop into leaders, we have to make sure that they are developed with the proper tools to lead and the proper mindset to be effective in their jobs and in leading others. It's irresponsible for us to promote the people leader and not give them what they need to succeed. Most often people find difficulty in training new leaders as they often didn’t have proper training themselves. Some might not even see that there is a need to develop leaders, they either can do it or they are not the right person for the job.

In business, a real but often misunderstood concept called the Peter Principle, explains the pitfalls of promoting a person who is not ready for the position. The principle, which states “people are promoted to their level of incompetence,” shows that a person can excel in their position, then gets promoted to a higher position. Once in this higher position, this employee who was good at the last role, is now in a position where they know very little. When these occurrences happen occasionally, the employee stumbles until shown the way, best case scenario, or never learns, worst case. When these occurrences happens often, with many people in roles they do not understand, the company can suffer great loss of quality and service, and often is the turning point in the failure of the company.

The key point is to make sure that the people get proper training and guidance when they elevate to a new position. A famous quote by Harvey S. Firestone goes “The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership.” While many people do respect the need for training, they don’t know how, and this is the biggest snag.



Not only do we train employees to a task, we need to train the future leaders to do certain responsibilities (and to not do certain actions). But what does this training look like?
These six steps are broken into small chunks to make them manageable, but are intended to foster a long-term plan.