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Leadership development: Why ready-enough beats ready-now
In today’s volatile operating environment, organizations must start crucible-style development earlier, rethink assessment, and support leaders ‘ready enough’ to do the job.
Rapid read:
- AI, geopolitics, and a disappearing middle are disrupting traditional leadership development.
- Organizations in this environment need to make bets on high-potential talent who appear ready enough to take on senior leadership roles.
- Getting this right means starting earlier with crucible development experiences, assessing ready-enough potential, and supporting new leaders before, during, and after transition.
At 42, James had been tapped as managing director, EMEA, for an industrial automation multinational. This was a strong affirmation of his ability to solve problems, think analytically, and lead decisively under pressure – and a significant step up from his previous role as head of product development.
Three months into the job, a major problem landed on his desk. A $40m order was scheduled to arrive with a major customer within six weeks, but James’s key supplier was caught up in cross-border complications, leaving the delivery schedule in serious doubt. He and his team moved fast. They used AI to model supply-chain options, test different scenarios, and assess potential financial and operational outcomes, but their analysis proved inconclusive. The first option prioritized the client’s needs but squeezed margins for James’s business. The second secured delivery but meant betting on a new supplier and jeopardizing a long-standing relationship. A third looked promising until the team ran the model against a different set of assumptions.
James had always relied on his ability to solve problems, but this felt different. Now there were too many possible answers, too much uncertainty surrounding them, and too little time to decide. With his team looking to him to make the call and the deadline looming, James began seriously doubting his own judgment. For the first time in his career, having more data – and conducting more analysis – was not making his decision any easier. Meanwhile, his customer and his organization were waiting.
James’s story illustrates why career progression has become more complex for many businesses.
There are three powerful forces reshaping the transition from functional expertise to enterprise leadership. First, organizations are grappling with geopolitical turbulence. Operating across borders means navigating regulatory and legal shifts and responding to supply chain and other risks in real time – a first-order leadership challenge. Then there’s technology. In a world where AI can crunch data, generate options, and model scenarios in seconds, the leader’s role is shifting from gathering insight to exercising judgment about what to trust, implement, or ignore – including systems they may only partially understand. Meanwhile, the jump from functional manager to enterprise leader is coming earlier for many. As hierarchies flatten and middle-management roles are squeezed, more leaders are arriving in enterprise roles without the preparatory experiences that used to ease that leap.
This creates a real quandary. The roles ahead of successors are becoming too demanding, and the capabilities required too broad, for organizations to build a leadership bench in which people are fully equipped to step into the role and hit the ground running. Leaders moving into enterprise roles are expected to navigate transitions and perform tasks for which they have had fewer preparatory experiences. In today’s context, the notion of ready-now leadership talent is no longer realistic. People are quite simply not ready.
I believe the current operating environment calls for a shift in thinking about talent: from developing leaders who have everything they need to do the job in situ to making bigger bets on potential. It’s about developing leaders who are ready enough to do what the organization needs and supporting them as they grow into the role.
So how do you develop talent that is ready enough to lead at the enterprise level? There are four imperatives for organizations right now.
1 – Start earlier – much earlier
There is growing evidence that organizations are leaving it too late to develop their leadership bench. As one Deloitte report puts it: “Succession planning is one of those things that has no lit fuse.” If the leadership pipeline is compressing, and if people are ascending to enterprise roles with a shorter on-ramp, organizations will need to start developing ready-enough leadership capabilities earlier in people’s careers. And they must be clear about what those capabilities look like.
Navigating the three forces reshaping leadership transitions today means building the mental agility to see multiple perspectives. It means being able to balance polarities rather than simply solve problems, developing the emotional regulation necessary to manage stress, and having the real-time self-awareness to read, process and adapt to a changing environment. Organizations should prioritize development and exposure that accelerate these inner skills, alongside the technical capabilities their future leaders will need.
This can be hard. A good approach is to offer high-potential talent early crucible experiences.
Giving an emerging leader a turnaround challenge in a new function requires them to deploy fast analysis, prioritization, and decisive action with limited familiarity, knowledge, and
data.
2 – Design and curate crucible experiences
With mid-level roles compressing, organizations need to find new pathways to give future leaders increased exposure and broaden their range. Experiences that push people out of their comfort zone and challenge assumptions, beliefs, and approaches hone and test the inner skills leaders need.
Organizations can design and curate cross-functional experiences for potential leaders using my STARS framework: start-ups and turnarounds, accelerated growth, realignment, and sustaining success scenarios.
Giving an emerging leader a turnaround challenge in a new function, for example, requires them to deploy fast analysis, prioritization, and decisive action with limited familiarity, knowledge, and data. Challenging them to scale a successful business different from the one they know requires them to identify the drivers of growth while anticipating future threats. They must implement structures, processes, and systems that preserve the values underpinning success while innovating to stay ahead of the curve.
These kinds of crucible experiences early in a career can fast-track the inner skills and technical capabilities ready-enough leaders need. The key is to observe how rising talent responds under pressure and what they learn from the experience – whether they sink or swim. That also means finding new ways to assess potential.
Assessing ready-enough potential is not the same as assessing ready-now capability.
3 – Rethink assessment
Traditional succession planning focuses on building a bench of ready-now successors and assessing them against relatively static markers: past track record, tenure and experience, current performance, credentials, and so on.
In an environment of shifting frontiers, a vanishing middle, and AI constantly moving the dial on judgment and decision-making, organizations need to rethink both what they need from future leaders and how they assess those capabilities. Specifically, they will need to become far more dynamic in evaluating the transversal capabilities and mindsets that enable people to get into the role quickly and succeed.
This means asking – and being able to answer – new questions. Among them: how do you assess strategic thinking and the ability to shift perspective between the big picture and the detail, the present and the future? How do you assess tension tolerance and the capacity to hold opposing views at the same time? How do you evaluate someone’s ability to remain grounded as a leader while constantly adapting to what is happening in the environment around them?
Assessing ready-enough potential is not the same as assessing ready-now capability. Organizations and HR will need to focus more on the developmental agility and resilience of the talent they are developing – on people’s ability to transition successfully into a role that requires fluency in technology, business, and the interaction between the two, while the operating, regulatory, and political context continues to shift.
The challenges facing ready-enough future leaders are moving targets. To succeed, they will also need support.
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4 – Support the transition
Leadership transition doesn’t begin and end with an appointment. Before the transition, throughout the first 90 days in role and beyond, new leaders will need targeted support to navigate the challenges they face.
Organizations can do plenty here. Focused measures before the transition can include stakeholder mapping – detailing who has a stake in driving success and how to enlist their support – and shadow periods that enable incoming leaders to observe, engage with, and learn from incumbents.
During the first 90 days, new leaders can benefit from team assessments to identify capability needs or alignment gaps, intensive coaching to navigate new terrain and build resilience, listening tours around the organization to gather data, input, and feedback, and support in securing quick wins – those high-impact, low-complexity adjustments and actions that can build confidence, credibility, and trust.
As new leaders bed in beyond the first three months, organizations can continue to provide support through real-time monitoring, structured feedback for course correction where necessary, and clear communication with the C-suite, the board, and other stakeholders to keep objectives and expectations aligned.
Leadership development today is about early investment, cross-functional stretch challenges and exposure, dynamic evaluation, and ongoing support.
Leadership development today is about early investment, cross-functional stretch challenges and exposure, dynamic evaluation, and ongoing support. It’s about taking chances – making bigger bets – on talent that will face the same complexities as newly appointed EMEA President James: challenges that lie ahead, not behind, the organization.
Organizations that win in the future won’t be those with the deepest bench of ready-now leaders. They will be organizations that build adaptive skills, continuous sensing and adjustment, integrative thinking, and the capacity to make sense of complexity – ensuring that their future decision-makers are ready enough to lead in an environment being constantly reshaped by forces beyond their control.
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