One of the greatest challenges management faces is selecting and grooming the next generation of management. Select the wrong people and you can have a lasting negative impact on your company's bottom line and the future price of your company stock.
In the old days, the low-risk approach was to promote someone similar to yourself. There was comfort in thinking you could more accurately forecast the potential of someone like yourself. Now, however, the diversity of the workforce is increasing along with goals for management to be more representative of the whole population. You are faced with trying to predict the potential of people from a wide range of backgrounds who look at the world very differently than you do.
Fortunately, there is a low-risk way to find the natural leaders. Encourage your best and brightest young employees to take on leadership roles in volunteer organizations and watch to see who succeeds. The style can be transferred to the workplace and may yield better results than the command-and-control managerial methods typically learned within a corporation.
In business, there is the illusion that - as in the military model - ordering people to do things is an effective approach. Tell employees what to do and they are fired if they don't do it properly. Taken to the extreme, you have people performing tasks rather than pursuing new opportunities and solving problems. Employees will apply their intellect to figuring out ways around the system rather than pursuing what is in the company's best interests.
In contrast, volunteer leaders must capture the hearts and minds of workers. They must create clear line-of-sight goals so that the potential volunteers can share ownership of the vision of what the group is trying to accomplish. Since salary and bonuses are not part of the system, reward comes in the form of personal satisfaction and public recognition. Volunteer managers must learn to structure tasks to provide personal gratification through awards and recognition to the people doing the work. Volunteer management skills translate to business. Studies show, when financial compensation is competitive, personal satisfaction and recognition are effective and long-lasting methods of motivating people.
You will have to be more proactive to learn which of your employees is most effective in managing volunteer efforts, but you may get more honest feedback than you do with a formal system of appraisals. You can judge employees by results, not by superficial characteristics such as physical appearance or gift of gab. If a favorite fails to show real leadership ability in a volunteer setting, you have been saved the headaches and disappointment of promoting the wrong person into company management.
Nothing is totally free. This approach will cost you some of your employees' time and, depending on the nature of their volunteer work, travel expenses and conference fees. However, if you encourage young employees to become active in an industry professional society, they can learn managerial skills, gain technical skills and make important business contacts. In an appropriate professional society, whether or not they distinguish themselves as leaders, they will gain valuable technical skills that make them better employees.
The Society of Petroleum Engineers recognizes the importance of providing greater opportunities for young professionals to learn a wide range of interpersonal, technical and managerial skills. New programs encourage young professionals to assume active managerial roles in the society. Don't miss this
type of opportunity to train your employees and to see who the real leaders are.

Eve Sprunt, eveprunt@aol.com
is president of the Society of Petroleum Engineers
and an oil industry executive.

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