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To continue the plant analogy, if you want a nice garden, you have to ensure adequate sunlight, water, pesticides, and fertilizer for your plants.

Similarly, to develop your leaders, you need to review and adjust your incentives. Designing a proper incentive plan is an art and science in itself. Suffice to say, if you know the outcomes of your incentive plan, you can predict the behaviors much better than all the statements and slides used to describe your business strategy.

The key items to check are:

• Will the leadership training emphasize the right behaviors targeted by your incentives?
• Will the leaders face mixed messages from your incentives when they return to the workplace from a training session?
• Are there additional resources and capabilities needed to facilitate leadership behaviors? Sometimes training and incentives are not enough.

If you need to hire a compensation specialist, that is fine, but a good compensation specialist will ask you to articulate the above anyway.

By following this line of thinking, you are taking a systems approach to developing your leadership bench.

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This measures ability to recognize and solve problems for your customers. It does not refer to “emotional maturity.”

A key classification of your leaders is by years of experience. Divide your list of leaders into 3 buckets:

• Emerging: These leaders have less than 5 years of relevant experience.
• Mid-career: These leaders have between 6 and 14 years of experience.
• Advanced: These leaders have over 15 years of relevant experience.

Now having “relevant” experience is different from “total” years of experience. Thus, another metric to measure maturing is diversity of experience. You could create two or three buckets as follows:

• Beginner: These leaders have experience one or two business functions.
• Intermediate: These leaders have experience with  three to five business functions.
• Advanced: These leaders are ready for general management positions because they have touched almost every function in the organization.

Now you can set up a 3×3 matrix and plot your leaders on the graph. Be prepared to debate and modify your list based on new insight.