Neglected Signs of Leadership Success: Motivation and Interest
A large company recently underwent a restructuring that led to shuffling of leaders among new and redesigned leadership positions. The company leaned heavily on succession plans to staff positions. In several cases they made offers to current successors for a given position only to have all candidates turn it down. All of them.
Many of you may be nodding your head. Business and HR leaders can be lulled into a false sense of security looking at their robust pipeline health metrics, only to discover their healthy pipeline was an illusion. Do you know how real your talent pipelines are? You may be missing important information on the health of your pipeline that could help identify fit problems and help you better predict leader success. How many employees in your talent pipeline aren’t really interested in leadership positions and responsibilities?
Underestimating the health of your leadership pipeline is a dangerous proposition today. The world is changing rapidly, and leadership development professionals are overwhelmingly saying traditional leadership training and development to fill skills gaps isn’t enough to equip leaders for the future. [i] Winning in the future will require a new level of leadership and leadership development to support the types and levels of transformation happening in organizations today. Today’s leaders must:
Widen their skill sets
Challenge existing paradigms and patterns
Manage polarities and paradoxes
Potentialize people
Are your leaders ready? I have my doubts. Learning new skills, thinking deeply about paradigms , patterns, paradoxes, and polarities, and building a bench of capable leaders deeper in the organization isn’t necessarily the strong suit of today’s leaders. They focus on the skills that got them to where they are now. They stay in the orbit of the business and HR paradigms they learned in school and reinforced throughout their careers. They don’t deal with polarities and paradoxes, preferring to pick a path they know or wait to make a decision until it’s too late. And finally, most leaders choose to “pulverize” people rather than potentializing them, seeing them as costs to be cut instead of assets to invest in. They swing the pendulum back and forth between “razing and ravaging” to “rapid rebuilding.” As research has shown, this strategy is not a prescription for success. [ii]
What does it mean to be “ready?”
How do you know if your future leaders will be ready for these challenges? What early signs and signals should you be paying attention to? There are many models and frameworks to guide you in assessing your leaders. One of my favorites is the Leadership Blueprint by Allan Church and Rob Silzer. [iii] They outline 3 broad areas of skills and capabilities and six building blocks that reflect the important markers, signs, and signals of leadership potential:
Career Dimensions:
Leadership skills
Functional and technical skills
Growth Dimensions
Learning Skills
Motivation Skills
Foundational Dimensions
Personality Characteristics
Cognitive Capabilities
I have adapted this model for my use over the years, leveraging available tools and creating new tools to assess employees, leaders, high-potentials, and successors in making important talent decisions:
Who has leadership potential and how much?
Who should we prioritize for development investment?
Who should be a successor?
Which position is the best fit for a high-potential talent or a successor?
Who should we promote?
Who should we prioritize for key development positions or assignments
Who should we discuss during talent reviews?
In my experience, one of these signs is frequently neglected: Motivation/Interests. Do employees have the drive, energy and ambition to be a leader? Are they confident in their ability to ascend to higher-level leadership roles and be successful? Are they interested in leadership responsibilities and activities?
Research shows if they don’t have a strong motivation to lead (MTL), they aren’t likely to step up when opportunities arise, they aren’t likely to prioritize important leadership behaviors, and they aren’t likely to be successful in higher-level leadership roles. [iv] My own research suggests that motivation/interest is one of the most important signs of leadership potential and should be a high priority for assessment. It has consistently predicted leadership success, regardless of who is providing the information (managers or employees).
While this sounds intuitive, there are several reasons managers and HR business partners don’t do their due diligence in this area.
Manager assumptions. Managers assume everyone wants a leadership position. No discussion is needed. This makes sense given their perspective and given what we know from research. Experts distinguish 3 different bases of MTL: 1) Intrinsic interest in leading others (affective MTL); 2) a feeling of being obligated to take on a leadership position (normative MTL), and 3) a desire to lead because of the benefits and perks these positions provide (calculative MTL). Managers’ assumptions tend to bias them toward 2) and 3). Again, no conversation is needed.
Employee hedging. Even if managers have a conversation with employees, absent better options, what employee will close the door to a leadership role given the benefits that come with it?
Transparency. These processes tend to have low transparency, so candidates themselves aren’t involved in discussions about how they should be developed and to what end, and they are frequently unaware these conversations are even taking place. It’s hard to have career conversations with employees when you can't share why you are having that conversation and can’t answer most of their questions! Finally, as a manager, you don’t want to raise expectations you aren’t sure you can meet.
Manager skills and motives. Managers may lack the skills to have productive career conversations. They also might not be motivated to have them. They don’t want to lose their best talent by encouraging them to think about options beyond their current role.
Manager ignorance. Even if managers have good career conversations with their employees, they may not be involved in succession and staffing decisions so don’t have an opportunity to provide their perspective. In many organizations, succession planning decisions happen at higher levels with little input from direct managers.
Steps you can take
Organizations with more mature processes take several actions to add employee motivation and interest data to their talent decision making process.
Accountability. They have formal expectations of managers to have career conversations with employees, codified in their leadership expectations and competencies.
Framework. The have a framework that describes the important signs, signals, and markers of success along with detailed definitions to better enable managers to capture the right information.
Training. Managers are trained in the framework and how to gather the right information, and why it’s important. They are also trained to have effective career conversations.
Tools. Managers and employees have tools to ensure the right information is captured in consistent ways across the organization.
Technology. Organizations use technology applications that efficiently gather, report, and store information from managers and employees and provide easy access to the decision makers.
I created tools to increase the quality of information about employee motivation and interests available to decision makers. I have found this information significantly predicts several important leadership outcomes (level of potential, type of potential, successor fit, ascendence into leadership roles, leadership level, and leadership effectiveness).
Manager High-Potential Survey. A survey managers complete for each one of their employees, assessing employee interests and other markers of potential. Results available in a manager/administrative report.
Career Interest Survey. An interest survey employees complete. Results are available in a manager/administrative report and employee report.
These tools can be used as part of a high-potential identification, talent planning process or succession planning process. They can also be used for staffing critical positions or developmental positions. Finally, they can be used to help place employees into a high-potential program, or as part of an existing development program.
You need to have eyes wide open when looking at your talent pipeline and ensure it is real. Understanding of the motivations and interests of your employees is an important part of having strong and healthy high-potential pools and succession plans.
End Notes
[i] Harvard Business Impact (2024). Time to transform. Global leadership development study, Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning. https://www.harvardbusiness.org/insight/2024-global-leadership-development-study/.
[ii] Colquitt, A. L. (2025). Why layoffs are bad for business. Zocalo Public Square, June 12. https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/why-layoffs-are-bad-for-business/.
[iii] Church, A. H., & Silzer, R. (2014). Going behind the corporate curtain with a blueprint for leadership potential. People & Strategy, 36, 51-58. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315779502_Going_behind_the_Corporate_Curtain_with_a_BluePrint_for_Leadership_Potential_An_Integrated_Framework_for_Identifying_High-Potential_Talent.
[iv] Badura, K. L., Galvin, B. M., Owens, B. P., Grijalva, E., & Joseph, D. L. (2020). Motivation to lead: A meta-analysis and distal-proximal model of motivation and leadership. Journal of Applied Psychology, 105, 331-354. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335078435_Motivation_to_lead_A_meta-analysis_and_distal-proximal_model_of_motivation_and_leadership.
I would also recommend checking out this article on the general power of interests in predicting a wide variety of outcomes: Rounds, J. & Su, R. (2014). The nature and power of interests. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23, 98-103. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261358519_The_Nature_and_Power_of_Interests.