How to figure out if someone has leadership potential? How to respond, if being approached with this kind of topic? “What do I need to do to get into a leadership position?” - I got this question more than once. As a habit, I’m trying to write down my thoughts on more-than-once topics.

Here it goes:

“How can I, as a Leader-Leader, find out if someone has the potential to grow into a leadership position?”

So you want to be a manager?

For me, it doesn’t matter if you are being approached by someone, or you spot the potential in someone yourself and want to dig deeper. It’s much more important that your candidate has the motivation to learn, and understands that this potential move is a change in careers.

I think it is great when your people want to move into leadership positions. It shows that people care and want to take responsibility. Some even say that lots of senior engineers should try management, for at least 2 years. At the same time, not everyone can do or should do so.

Find out why

It might help if you share your journey with the candidate. How did you get into management? What roadblocks did you encounter? What were the biggest challenges you had to overcome? To get started on some light reading, I will attach some book references that are also story-driven. I think it is a good start to ease in.

I won’t go into the differentiation between Manager vs. Leader. I think that this discussion is pretty much useless. Still, when you understand what leadership means for you, it will help you to communicate your expectations much better. Being a first-time manager can be hard, no one tells you what to do. What are you even supposed to do as a manager?

It helped me to understand:

From now on, my main focus will be people, not code.
Changing into a leadership role is a career changer, sometimes disguised as a promotion.
It is not about me anymore. It’s about my people. I will be assessed on my teams’ performance, not my individual achievements.

Some lessons learned:

I honed my engineering skills for many years, but when changing into a management position, I started at (almost) zero.
In order to be curious, eager to learn, I needed to step out of my comfort zone first.
I needed to get very comfortable with not having all the answers and learn how to endure uncomfortable situations.
Both code and people require the same thing to thrive: focused, sustained attention. No one does both well.
Management does not mean that you tell people to do things “your way”.
As levels go up, manager & engineer tracks require identical communication skills. The real superpower on both sides is enabling others.

Some questions to figure it out

Here are some questions that you can use, to figure it out:

What does Leadership mean for you in particular?
If you think about your day-to-day work in a leadership role, how does that look like?
When reading material about leadership - which topics do you find particularly interesting? What appeals to you? How much motivation do you have to deal with topics like soft skills?
How important is IC work, like coding, for you? How comfortable would you be working “hands-off”? And where is your limit?

Things for your candidate to consider:

How comfortable are you in running meetings?
Do you like to teach or coach?
How do you behave in a conflict situation?
How often do you give feedback to others?

Next steps

Coach your candidate. Figure out what works as a learning method (books, audio, podcasts, blogs).
Suggest some reading material, and start a discussion with your candidate. Use material that also worked for you along the way, something that helped you learn.
Give additional responsibility to create experience and learning. Observe your candidate and give quick feedback.