In a recent client engagement, we supported a leader who wanted to move into a VP role in her organization. However, it soon became clear that she was not ready for a senior leadership role. Our role involved helping her understand where she needed to build her skills and supporting her in doing that.
Perhaps you have some promising team members who are eager to move up to the next level. How can you tell if they’re ready to become senior leaders?
Communication ― Senior leaders must distill complex situations into clear recommendations. This means summarizing the context, presenting a decision matrix, and making a specific recommendation.
A senior leader’s manager (likely a C-level leader) is making hundreds of decisions every day, so the senior leaders who report to them must give them all the information they need to enable swift, confident decisions.
Strategic thinking ― Senior leaders do not respond immediately to every single issue that comes across their desks. First, they need to understand the context, the potential solutions, and their impacts before responding. Then, they prioritize which problems they respond to first.
A leader who is just responding to what’s in front of them shows that they’re a good doer but not that they can think strategically.
Influence ― Senior leaders must be able to scan the room, determine everyone’s motivations, and understand what everyone needs to make a decision. For some, this could be the right timing while for others it’s more about how the recommendation is presented.
Senior leaders adapt their approach to bring stakeholders along and build consensus.
Vision ― Senior leaders understand how all the pieces fit together. They start with the vision, identify key priorities, and consider what others need to be successful. Less experienced team members might build effective systems without understanding how those systems connect to broader organizational goals.
If you’re working with emerging leaders who aren’t demonstrating all these skills yet, the good news is these can all be developed with the right coaching and practice.
Try this — A practical tool to help you think like a leader
How do emerging leaders build the self-awareness, communication skills, and strategic thinking that senior roles require?
The Manager Memo is an excellent starting point. It’s a document you share with your direct reports that transparently communicates how you work and what you expect.
Your Manager Memo should cover the essentials: your work style, expectations, accountability structures, team mission and vision, and team norms. Include practical details too — meeting structures, working hours, check-in procedures, and your performance review cadence. The goal is to eliminate guesswork and create clarity from the start.
One of the most valuable aspects of writing a Manager Memo is that it forces you to articulate what YOU need to do your best work. This self-awareness becomes a blueprint for supporting others — both your direct reports AND your own manager. You’ll naturally start considering their work style, what information they need to make decisions, and how you can set them up for success.
The result? Stronger relationships, clearer expectations, and a team that knows exactly how to work together effectively.
Join us — January Talent Roundtable
Together, we covered all kinds of topics in our monthly Talent Roundtables in 2025:
- Organizational health (January)
- Employee engagement (February)
- Strategic planning for talent leaders (March)
- Career pathways (June)
- Organizational design (July)
- Talent market trends (September)
- Performance management (October)
- How AI is impacting nonprofit work (November)
- Teacher recruitment (December)
We’ll continue these discussions in 2026. Please join us! It’s really helpful to get together with other talent leaders to share challenges, perspectives, and ideas.
Sign up to add the next Talent Roundtable to your calendar: January 14 from 12 to 1pm Eastern. The topic is still TBD ― we’ll share that soon.
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Work with us — Organizational design and succession planning
If you’re thinking about leadership readiness, you’re probably thinking about your organization’s future more broadly too.
In order to ensure that the organization is set up to thrive in the coming years, ask yourself: Does the current organizational design support the organization’s goals and desired outcomes in the next 3-5 years?
If not, it’s time to rethink your organizational design.
You want to make sure you have clear organizational leveling (based on skills, experience, attributes, years of experience, functional expertise, etc.) and a common understanding of what it means to be at each role level (e.g., director). This leveling guides the organizational structure.
After you determine the new structure, you must decide how your current employees fit into the structure. Some may need coaching to grow into new roles, or you may need to hire new team members with different expertise.
TalentED Advisors can assess and redesign your organizational structure, assess your current team, and develop a coaching and succession plan.
Book a free, no-obligation call so we can explore whether TalentED Advisors is a good fit to help your organization.
