How to identify future leaders in manufacturing

Careers in leadership shouldn’t just “happen” in metal fabrication and other manufacturing sectors; they need to be planned for and developed around a company’s strategic plan. Getty Images

Identifying and developing leaders is a critical responsibility for all sustainable businesses—and it’s an investment. It goes back to the old story of a CEO and a CFO bantering behind closed doors. The CFO asks, “What if we spend money to train them and they quit?” The CEO says, “What if we don’t … and they stay?”

When they can’t find the right talent within the organization, leaders look outside to fill a current or anticipated opening. But many times fabricators do promote from within. If those promoted leaders have been coached and trained over the years, they have a better chance of sliding seamlessly into their leadership role. If they haven’t received coaching and training, the transition might not be as seamless—and even worse, the CEO’s nightmare might come to fruition: Our ineffective leaders haven’t been trained … and they’re staying.

Life at the Pre-COVID Fabricator

Has COVID-19 changed the game? How do fabricators identify leaders in a world of physical distancing and unprecedented unpredictability? As it turns out, many of the same techniques used before the pandemic apply. If anything, the pandemic has reinforced how important it is to have strong employee development plans in place.

To illustrate this, think back to what we all fondly remember as “normal times.” To identify future leaders, a fabricator’s top leaders looked to their high performers, people who actively took on more work and were always trying to improve themselves by learning new things. Top leaders also asked supervisors who they felt was promotable. Employees identified as promotable followed a written plan and had regular follow-up meetings with their managers, who were responsible for tracking and encouraging their development.

Top performers worked their way through this formal development plan, and their managers encouraged and coached them along the way. These high performers also probably attended outside training at conferences like FABTECH. The formal development plan also rewarded employees for their efforts. Without recognition, including raises, how could those top-performing employees know that their company valued their extra effort? Their compensation continued to grow with their new skills. After all, the last thing fabricators wanted was for top performers to become discouraged and easy recruiting targets.

On the other hand, some fabricators took an informal approach to employee development. Sure, they encouraged top performers as they continually relied on them to solve tough problems, but they never coached them in a structured way, and they had no written plan for their further development as a leader.

COVID Time

The pandemic arrives with a tidal wave of disruption. Being essential businesses, many fabricators are still open and working, albeit in a reduced capacity and in a physically distant way.

Fabricators with formal leadership development plans have a strong, engaged team in place, and high performers find opportunities to contribute in new ways. Something similar could be happening at fabricators without formal development plans, but it’s less likely.

Companies that approach employee development informally have a better chance of creating an environment that fosters misunderstandings, destructive politics, and frustration—especially during tumultuous times. Top performers might have been a little discouraged before the pandemic, and now their frustration is only more acute. This makes the current disruption even more disruptive, as volumes fluctuate dramatically and the economy stumbles in fits and starts. The recovery will happen eventually, but will top performers stick around, or will they be poached?

Qualities of a Leader

Obviously, having a formal leadership development plan puts a company in a better place. But before creating a plan from scratch, a company’s executive team first needs to answer a basic question: What makes a good leader?

First, consider a person’s capability and potential. No matter how much you whip a cat, it cannot carry a piano. So many top managers are not getting the results they expected, and that’s because they’re whipping cats. To avoid this, managers need to honestly assess an employee’s capability and potential to learn a new skill within the time needed. No matter how nice or how much interest employees have in a position, if they do not have the skills or capacity to perform the job, they shouldn’t be considered.

Second, leaders need motivation and desire to do the job. Many well-qualified people still don’t seem to get the job done. If supervisors are trying to find out how to motivate someone, that person is in the wrong role. You cannot motivate someone who lacks that internal spark to exercise the initiative to learn or to do more.

Career Planning

A fabricator’s org chart identifies its formal leaders, but the company has informal leaders too, those whom others turn to when they need help and guidance. Informal leaders attend conferences (in person or virtually), are continually curious, and willingly share lessons learned with co-workers.

Informal leaders also might not be in the traditional “feeder roles” for formal leadership positions, either. During times of disruption—like, say, a pandemic—these informal leaders show the initiative, adaptability, and courage to stand out when others are pulling back. They apply their skills and thrive during times of change. Managers should look for opportunities to identify these informal leaders, especially those who are not in the traditional feeder groups, then coach and mentor them for the formal leadership roles they could one day have.

Career planning and development involves giving every employee a chance to express their career goals. If employees show the desire and motivation to learn new skills, managers should recognize their increasing value and put it to work.

Companies need formal processes that allow employees to self-identify roles they want to fill. It can be as simple as an internal job posting requirement—that is, giving internal employees a chance to apply before looking outside. Postings must identify the job requirements clearly, including the education, skills, competencies, and experience an employee needs to be considered a qualified candidate. These qualifications must match what is really necessary to do the job, though they also can account for expected changes to the job in the near future.

Employees also can self-identify the roles they want to fill as part of a formal career-pathing program. Career-pathing doesn’t guarantee everyone will be promoted to the position he or she wants, but having a formal process helps everyone receive ongoing development to keep their skills current and get the most out of their jobs. Some might not want to be a formal leader, while those who do can throw their hat in the ring.

There is nothing more demotivating for employees than showing interest in a job that they’ve been doing—an acting department supervisor, for instance—then being required to train someone else on that job. At best this will demotivate the employee and result in unplanned turnover; at worst, this will lead to claims of discrimination.

This can happen at companies without formal employee development plans, where managers assume that employees merely working their job is sufficient for guiding their development. If managers pay attention to and (dare I say) manage people—via coaching, mentoring, and timely and effective feedback, they’ll recognize when high performers actively look for more work or try to improve themselves.

Formalizing employee development plans with benchmarks and milestones helps both the employee and manager stay on track. Further, management needs to create opportunities for employees to apply what they’ve learned. This might be through temporary assignments or by leading projects. In fact, COVID-19 might create some nontraditional leadership opportunities, such as leading a task force to develop a sales and marketing plan in this new physically distant world, that will benefit the company over the long term.

Training for Managers and Supervisors

Before assessing their employees’ potential for promotion and growth, managers need to be trained on how to do this effectively. It starts by developing the qualifications for each position and explaining why each is important. Without training, this process can be little more than a beauty contest for favored employees, without regard to qualifications.

Of course, not every employee is a good candidate for a high-level managerial role. Employee development plans need to consider career advancement opportunities for both managers and individual contributors. Nothing is more frustrating for employees who do not want to be managers than to feel they have no path for advancement, or no way to make a difference at the company.

All roles at a company are important for the company to succeed. If you employ a talented welder, press brake operator, or anyone else in the skilled trades, they must have a way to grow and achieve their career aspirations. If managers aren’t talking to employees and helping them to achieve their career aspirations, then it should be no surprise when they decide to continue their career elsewhere.

Once trained, managers then can develop a formal process for identifying those with leadership potential. At least once or (even better) twice a year, supervisors should assess their employees and identify those they feel are promotable. And they need to use concrete benchmarks set by the qualifications—skills, competencies, experience—identified for each management and supervisory position on the org chart. Again, this isn’t a beauty contest. Just because Joe’s a good guy who’s been with the company forever doesn’t mean he’ll be an effective leader.

Career Planning and the Strategic Plan

A company’s strategic plan guides the investments the company makes as it moves toward its goals. This involves various kinds of capital spending, of course, but what about the people component?

Here’s where CEOs play an integral role. They can prepare an organizational chart with the revenue and head count. They list the age of each leader and the prior few years of turnover by position. They then compare this information with a SWOT analysis—considering a company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats—to identify strategic changes to the business.

Keeping the SWOT analysis in mind, the CEO and his team consider the business’s future three to five years out. If significant growth or changes are planned, such as adding or eliminating lines of business, the team asks questions that might resemble the following:

• Can the person in a specific leadership role handle an X-percentage increase in business?
• Can the person in the leadership role handle new markets?
• Do we have the expertise in-house to take on new lines of business? If not, when will that talent be needed?
• Considering historical turnover and the age of the leadership team, how many leaders do we envision leaving or retiring from the company over the next few years? (Beware of age bias here. Just because someone is old doesn’t mean he or she cannot grow or learn.) Do you have any successors in place or in development programs to fill planned or unplanned openings?

Asking these questions helps develop a strategic leadership development and recruiting plan, which helps define the education, skills, competencies, and experiences necessary for every new and existing role. From this, management creates a development plan for existing employees and leaders so they can learn how their roles will change and grow, and so they can handle more responsibility when the time comes. Note that the entire executive team should be involved in some or all aspects of this process, so no one should be surprised when the career planning discussion occurs.

The best career planning is a collaborative effort between the manager and employee. In an ideal scenario, employees will do about 70% of the work, managers the remaining 30%. Employees create the plan while managers modify and approve it, preparing dates and milestones to evaluate progress. This way, managers see how employees view their current responsibility and how realistic their career plans are. And if employees are given responsibility to create their career plan, they “own” it.

With career planning in place, the strategic recruiting plan can begin. Strategic recruiting identifies what roles need to be sourced from outside the company and by when. If the role isn’t needed immediately, the company can develop a plan detailing where to source the best candidates.

Strategies for Difficult Times

All this planning can help in disruptive times. The strategic plan might shift, and if it does, the skills and competencies that people need might shift as well. What roles will be needed that are not in the organization today, and what will the skills, competencies, and required experience be for those new roles?

The new strategic plan spurs change, the business adapts and ultimately overcomes seemingly insurmountable challenges. How? Jobs and career planning change as the strategic plan changes. It’s a virtuous cycle, and through it all, everyone has their eye on the strategic plan. After all, their careers are being shaped by it.

Key Points in Leadership Planning

• Create formal career-pathing programs that include ways for employees to self-identify roles they are interested in filling for all employees, not just those looking to move up into management.
• Identify the education, skills, competencies, and experiences required for success in each role.
• Train managers on how career planning works: 1. Don’t just look at traditional feeder roles for potential promotions. 2. Do look at employees who demonstrate leadership, initiative, and adaptability. 3. Help employees find ways to meet their development needs. This may require some out-of-the-box thinking.
• Train managers how to conduct more effective one-on-one sessions with employees, including strong coaching and mentoring skills.
• Create recognition and reward programs for employees who work hard and contribute more.
• Develop communication methods that go beyond traditional ones, such as company-private social media on an intranet site.
• Develop and update your strategic business plan so you can proactively update and manage career development and recruiting plans.