Challenge: An enterprise software company has grown its engineering team beyond its management capacity.
The company initially tried to address the gap by aggressively hiring managers from outside the company. While some were successful, about half failed to either gain the respect of their team or to run the teams efficiently.
I worked to shift to a model of internal promotion. It had two primary efforts: identify plausible candidates and train them into the role.
To identify candidates, I looked for engineers who had the respect of their team (determined by 360-degree feedback, observing team meetings, and 1:1s with team members). I met individually with each candidate to evaluate their interest in a leadership role as well as their people skills, weeding out anyone with obvious shortcomings on either front.
Next, I set up a training program to teach the expected skills. Part of that was a weekly training session, where respected leaders demonstrated essential management skills to anyone who was interested. These exercises frequently included role playing and group discussions, as well. Additionally, other senior leaders and I strategically delegated work to the most promising candidates, giving them a chance to develop their skills in a real-world setting and establishing their credibility with the team as they did so.
Result: With this two-pronged approach, we built a bench of potential leaders that we drew from whenever there was an open position. The success rate for those internal promotions was near 100%.