How to Decide Who to Promote Into Leadership

I have interviewed and promoted a lot of people into leadership roles over the years, and I genuinely enjoy those interviews. I like learning what someone wants for their career, why they want to lead, and what questions they have for me. But I have also learned that the interview is rarely where the decision gets made. By the time someone sits down across from me, the most important part of their interview has already happened. It happened over the last year, in hundreds of small moments with the people they work beside every day.

That is the idea I come back to every time we have a leadership opening: the interview was last year. If you are trying to decide who to promote, the most useful thing you can do is stop looking only at the conversation in front of you and start looking at the track record behind it.

Why is the interview a poor predictor of leadership?

An interview rewards people who interview well. Some people are wonderful at describing what they would do as a leader, and some people who would be wonderful leaders are not especially good at describing it. When you promote based mostly on the interview, you end up promoting the best talkers, and the team notices.

Leadership also has very little to do with the skills that got someone noticed in the first place. The top performer on a team is not automatically the person others want to follow. Being great at the work and being great at helping other people do the work are two different things, and only the second one is leadership. I wrote more about that gap in They Were Great at the Job. Now They Lead a Team.

What should you look at instead?

I look for one thing above everything else: did this person make the team better before anyone gave them a title? That shows up in ways that are easy to miss if you are not paying attention. It is the person who stays a few minutes late to help a newer teammate figure something out, the one people quietly go to when they are stuck, the one who shares credit and takes ownership when something goes wrong.

Ask the team who their leader already is

This is the part of my process that surprises people. I still post leadership openings, and I still interview everyone who applies. But behind the scenes, I also ask the team. I do not tell them who applied. I simply ask who they think the next leader should be and who helps make the team better.

Most of the time, the names the team gives me are people who already applied, which is reassuring. Sometimes the answer is a surprise. In one promotion round, the team named someone who was fairly new to the organization. She had not been there long, but she had already earned their trust and their respect, and they saw her as the person they wanted to work for. She was promoted, and she was the right choice.

In that same round, the team also named a woman who had not applied at all. I went and told her how the team saw her, because I think people deserve to know when they are already leading. That conversation stayed with her. She is now in a leadership role at a different company, and I am proud that the first push came from the people who worked beside her.

I weigh the team’s view more heavily than almost anything else. A peer who already has the team’s trust and relationships, and who the team already sees as a leader they want to work for, has passed the hardest test there is.

What do you tell the people who were not chosen?

This matters as much as the promotion itself. Someone who applied for a leadership role and did not get it is usually someone who cares, and you want them to keep caring. I sit down with each of them and build a development plan for the next opportunity.

The center of that plan is almost always the same: develop the people around you. It is the one leadership skill that requires no title, and it is the clearest signal that someone is ready. I tell anyone who wants to lead to start doing the job before they have the title, because that is exactly what the next interview will be about.

A simple process you can use

My son Caleb has heard me talk about this at the dinner table more than once, usually when he asks how someone becomes a captain or a leader on a team. My answer is always the same one I give at work. You do not become a leader the day someone gives you the title. You become one long before that, and the title just catches up.

This idea sits at the heart of my leadership workshop, You Are Capable of More: Leadership, where leaders practice spotting and developing the people who are already leading. I also wrote about readiness in CEO Weekly: Ready Before They Believe It.