When I worked in a warehouse, I ended every interview with a forklift driving test. Operating a forklift was a job requirement, and I needed to see if everyone could do it before I could hire them. Watching potential employees complete this short test made my hiring easier and much more successful. I knew whether they could do the most essential job task before I even hired them. Internally, we can use a similar approach to make better internal promotion decisions.
Talent reviews do a great job of assessing current performance. But what does current performance have to do with future performance? Is someone skilled at playing the violin destined to become a great conductor? Probably not; at least there’s no way to assume their skill as a violinist indicates their ability to lead an orchestra.
This is the same reason why not every great coach was a great player or why great players don’t always make the best coaches once they stop playing. Every job requires different skills. Leadership roles have their own skills and requirements that are different from front-line roles. Someone skilled at driving a forklift may or may not be skilled at leading forklift operators. I led forklift operators for over two years, and I still don’t know how to drive one.
A promotion means you’re taking on a new role with new accountabilities, tasks and skills. Your ability to successfully do one job isn’t a reason to believe you would succeed in a different job with different skill requirements. A leader’s day-to-day is vastly different than that of their front-line employees. Prior success is not the same as demonstrated readiness for leadership.
When an organization completes a talent review process, they’re taking stock of current performance. Issues arise when organizations assume high performance in someone’s current role means they have potential to succeed in a higher-level role. And this is how top performers get placed into leadership roles they lack the skill to succeed in.
Some organizations will rely on abstract things like desire or initiative to measure someone’s future potential within the organization. This is only a little bit more effective than using someone’s current performance as a tool to measure promotion readiness. But why rely only on indirect indicators when you can evaluate readiness through actual leadership work?
If you’re about to promote someone from within, you already have the perfect opportunity to assess them before promoting them into a new role. This is where stretch assignments come in.
Leaders need to be skilled at interviewing, coaching, training and communicating with their employees. You can easily assign a potential leader a task that requires them to coach an employee or help roll out communication for a new business change.
A strong stretch assignment should include clear expectations, defined decision rights, a time-bound scope, coaching from the current leader and specific success measures tied to the leadership behaviors the role requires. The employee should also understand what is being evaluated and what the assignment does or does not guarantee.
This is the same model used by professional baseball teams. Farm teams exist in professional baseball to help players develop, work on gaps, and demonstrate if they are ready for higher-level competition. Players in the developmental leagues can move up to a higher league for a time to show if they can sustain performance at a higher level.
Sometimes it doesn’t go well, in which case the player goes back down to a lower developmental level and works on what was seen as a gap. When it goes well for the player, they stay at the higher level. In the end, this process results in better player development and long-term sustainability at the highest level. This is how they eliminate most of the guesswork from their decisions. After all, there’s only one way to know if someone can succeed at a higher level: Give them higher-level work and evaluate how well they do with it.
Stretch assignments help take a lot of the guesswork out of promotion readiness. Evaluating someone’s ability to successfully handle leadership tasks before the promotion is one of the most practical ways to reduce risk for the employee, the team, and the company. Instead of promoting someone in March to fill a manager’s role, have them complete a two-month stretch assignment in March and April.
If it goes well, promote them in May. If it doesn’t go well, then you have a great opportunity to provide objective, actionable feedback to help your employees develop for their next stretch assignment. In this way, stretch assignments help you develop strong leaders who can achieve the results you expect.
