Not Everyone At Your Company Should Be A Leader.

Here's a framework for thinking about who should and should not lead.

Every business leader wants an edge to help develop talent faster and with a higher success rate. But despite these innovative efforts, career paths at most organizations look similar: An employee starts at an entry level job working on a team, advances to manage their own projects, then eventually is promoted to lead a team of their own.

In fact, most organizations have an explicit or unstated norm that becoming a manager or team leader is the only way to advance up the organizational chart or gain higher levels of compensation. To reach the highest level of seniority in an organization, an employee may even need to lead a full department, with dozens, or hundreds, of people under their leadership.

This path doesn't suit everyone, however. While a key responsibility of a leader is to identify and develop new leaders, it's also crucial to ensure the people identified for leadership roles actually want to lead. Any leader who fails to do this puts their organization's health in jeopardy.