"Ghost runner on second!”

As I have stated on a number of occasions in various blog posts in the past, one of my favorite comic strips growing up was "Calvin and Hobbes", a daily comic strip by the American cartoonist, Bill Watterson that ran from 1985 to 1995.  I follow the official "Calvin and Hobbes" on Twitter now and came across one of the great ones.  Calvin and Hobbes were playing baseball and were arguing about the use of "ghost runners" (if you don't know what I am referring to, please read about the "Invisible Runner Rule").  I remember using ghost runners throughout my childhood!  Basically, if you were playing kickball, baseball, softball, or whiffle ball with less than the full complement of players, you could use ghost runners.  Every kid in our neighborhood seemed to know about the unwritten rules about the use of ghost runners, so I don't remember ever having to argue about them as Calvin and Hobbes do in the comic strip below:

Okay, I know what you are thinking.  What in the world does the "Invisible Runner Rule" have to do with leadership?  As I was enjoying this particular comic strip and fondly reminiscing about ghost runners, I had to think about “ghost leaders”, or "hidden leaders."  One of the most important things that leaders can do in any organization is to cultivate talent.  Leaders need to find and develop new leaders - the future of the organization depends upon it.  I am amazed at how many times in the past year that we have opened up an internal search for a new leadership position within the organization and found hidden leaders (and I am defining "hidden leaders" as emerging leaders that seemingly fly beneath the radar and are not well-recognized as potential leaders in the organization).   

Organizations often can (and should) cultivate talent in the organization by inviting emerging leaders to participate in leadership development programs.  Kevin Lane, Alexia Lamaraud, and Emily Yeuh wrote an article for the McKinsey Institute (published in McKinsey Quarterly in January 2017) called "Finding Hidden Leaders".  In the article, these authors suggest four ways (one traditional, the other three relatively newer) of finding and developing talent.  Harvesting is the traditional method of choice and refers to the practice of letting the "cream rise to the top" where talented individuals emerge as stars within the organization and are placed in progressively higher positions of leadership.  Lane, Lamaraud, and Yeuh suggest that there are three better, more proactive (as opposed to the more reactive, harvesting, method) ways of cultivating talent - hunting, fishing, and trawling.  Hunting refers to the practice of "seeking out promising individuals from among those who don't normally make the short list" (in other words, rather than waiting on individuals to self-select with the traditional interview process, go out and find these individuals and encourage them to take on greater responsibility within the organization).  Fishing involves using "bait" (using "rewards for people who demonstrate specific skills").  Finally, trawling involves digging deep "into the work environment of employees to uncover skills you can't see by looking top-down." 

I don't know much about "hunting", "fishing", and "trawling", but I do know that finding hidden leaders takes a more proactive approach than what is traditionally practiced in most organizations today.  Ghost runners certainly do exist, but you have to work hard to find them.  And that is what leaders should be doing - finding and developing the next generation of talent.