Potential Leaders Are Already in Your Team. Here’s How to Find Them

Identifying potential leaders inside your organisation is one of the most commercially valuable things a senior marketer can do, and one of the most consistently mishandled. The people most likely to carry your growth strategy forward are usually already in the building. The problem is that most organisations are looking for the wrong signals.

Spotting leadership potential is not about finding the loudest voice in the room or the person with the most polished presentation style. It is about identifying who thinks clearly under pressure, who earns trust without demanding it, and who makes the people around them sharper.

Why Most Organisations Get This Wrong

There is a pattern I have seen repeat itself across agencies, in-house teams, and the broader marketing industry. Someone is brilliant at their job. They hit their numbers, they are reliable, they get things done. So they get promoted into a leadership role. And then, slowly or sometimes very quickly, things start to unravel.

It is not that the person is incapable. It is that the skills that made them exceptional as an individual contributor are not the same skills that make someone effective as a leader. Execution ability, technical depth, and personal output are genuinely valuable. But leadership requires something different: the ability to create conditions where other people do their best work, to make decisions with incomplete information, and to hold a team together when things are uncertain.

When I was turning around a loss-making agency, one of the first things I had to confront was that some of the most capable people in the building were not the right people to lead through a difficult period. They were excellent at their craft. But craft and leadership are different disciplines. Conflating them had been part of how the business got into trouble in the first place.

If you are thinking about how leadership development fits into a broader growth agenda, it is worth reading through the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy content on The Marketing Juice. Building the right team structure is not separate from commercial strategy. It is part of it.

What Does Leadership Potential Actually Look Like?

There are a handful of qualities that consistently show up in people who go on to lead well. None of them are exotic. Most of them are visible if you are paying attention to the right things.

Comfort with ambiguity. Strong leaders do not wait for perfect information before making a call. They gather what they can, make a considered decision, and adjust as new information arrives. People who freeze when the brief is unclear, or who escalate every uncertain situation upward, are telling you something important about how they will perform under real pressure.

Accountability without theatre. When something goes wrong, watch how people respond. Do they explain clearly what happened, own their part in it, and focus immediately on what comes next? Or do they spend their energy managing perception, deflecting, or performing contrition without actually changing anything? The difference matters enormously at scale. One approach builds trust. The other erodes it.

Genuine interest in other people’s development. This one is underrated. People who will become strong leaders tend to be genuinely curious about the people around them. They ask questions. They notice when someone is struggling. They share credit without being prompted. This is not a soft quality. It is a direct predictor of whether someone will be able to build and retain a high-performing team.

Commercial instinct. In a marketing context specifically, this is non-negotiable. A potential leader needs to understand that the work exists to drive a business outcome, not to win awards or generate activity. I have judged the Effie Awards, which are specifically designed to recognise marketing effectiveness rather than creative brilliance in isolation. Even in that context, the work that holds up is always rooted in a clear commercial problem. Potential leaders need to think that way instinctively.

The ability to give and receive direct feedback. This is rarer than it should be. Most people are either too conflict-averse to give honest feedback or too defensive to receive it. The people who can do both, calmly and without making it personal, are the ones who create the kind of environment where teams actually improve.

How Do You Identify These Qualities in Practice?

Structured assessment has its place. Psychometric tools, competency frameworks, and 360-degree feedback processes can surface useful information. But the most reliable signals come from unscripted situations, not from how someone performs when they know they are being evaluated.

Early in my career at Cybercom, I found myself handed a whiteboard marker in the middle of a Guinness brainstorm when the founder had to leave for a client meeting. No briefing, no handover, just a room full of people looking at me. My immediate internal reaction was something close to panic. But what that moment revealed, in retrospect, was something useful: how someone responds when they have no script and no safety net tells you more about their leadership instincts than almost any formal process.

Watch what people do in those moments. Do they step forward or step back? Do they read the room and adapt, or do they become rigid? Do they bring other people in or try to carry it alone? These are not things you can fake for long.

Some specific situations that tend to reveal leadership potential clearly:

• How someone handles a project that is going wrong. Not the post-mortem, but the moment they realise it is going wrong and have to decide what to do.
• How they behave toward junior colleagues when no senior person is present. Culture is what happens when the boss is not in the room.
• How they respond when their idea is rejected. Do they understand why? Do they push back constructively? Or do they disengage?
• Whether they proactively flag problems or wait to be asked. Leaders surface bad news early. They do not manage it quietly until it becomes a crisis.

The Role of Deliberate Exposure

Identifying potential is only the first step. Once you have spotted someone who shows genuine leadership promise, the most important thing you can do is give them exposure to real decisions, not simulated ones.

This does not mean throwing people in the deep end without support. It means creating structured opportunities for potential leaders to take on genuine commercial responsibility, with appropriate coaching and a clear understanding of what success looks like. There is a meaningful difference between a stretch assignment that builds someone’s capability and a situation where they are set up to fail because no one thought through what they actually needed.

When I was growing an agency from around 20 people to over 100, one of the things that worked was being deliberate about who sat in which rooms. Not every meeting needs every senior person. But some meetings, particularly those involving commercial decisions, client relationships, or strategic direction, are genuinely formative for the right people. Giving a potential leader visibility into how those decisions get made, and then asking them to reflect on what they observed, accelerates development in a way that formal training rarely does.

The challenge is that this requires senior leaders to be willing to share access. Some are not. They either do not think about development deliberately, or they have a vested interest in being the only person who understands certain things. Both are problems for organisational health.

It is also worth noting that the increasing complexity of go-to-market execution means that the bar for what a marketing leader needs to understand is rising. Potential leaders need exposure to the full commercial picture: pricing, margin, channel economics, customer acquisition costs, and retention dynamics. Not just the creative or campaign layer.

Common Assessment Mistakes to Avoid

There are a few recurring errors in how organisations assess leadership potential that are worth naming directly.

Mistaking confidence for competence. Articulate, confident people tend to do well in formal assessment settings. They present well, they handle structured interviews comfortably, and they give answers that sound right. This is not the same as being a strong leader. Some of the most effective leaders I have worked with are relatively quiet. They do not perform leadership. They just exercise it.

Over-indexing on current performance. Someone’s output in their current role is relevant data, but it is not the whole picture. The question is not whether they are good at what they do now. The question is whether they have the qualities to lead others through complexity. Those are related but distinct questions.

Ignoring cultural fit at the leadership level. This is not about hiring people who are similar to the existing team. It is about whether a potential leader’s values and approach are compatible with the kind of organisation you are trying to build. Someone who leads through fear, even if they get short-term results, will damage the culture in ways that take years to repair. I have seen this first-hand. The numbers might look fine for a while. The team will tell you a different story.

Relying entirely on self-nomination. Some organisations identify potential leaders by asking who wants to be a leader. This captures ambition, which is useful, but it also captures ego, which is less useful. The people who most want to be seen as leaders are not always the people who will be most effective in the role. Peer observation and manager assessment need to be part of the picture.

For broader context on how growth-focused organisations structure their commercial teams and decision-making, the growth strategy content on this site covers the commercial architecture that leadership development needs to sit within.

Building a Pipeline, Not Just Finding Individuals

The most resilient organisations do not just identify one or two potential leaders and hope for the best. They build a pipeline. This means having a clear view at any given time of who is at what stage of development, what they need to progress, and where the gaps are.

In practice, this requires a few things to be in place. First, senior leaders need to be having honest conversations about people, not just about performance against current targets. Second, there needs to be a shared language for what leadership potential looks like, so that assessment is consistent rather than dependent entirely on individual managers’ instincts. Third, there needs to be a genuine commitment to investing in development, which means time and money, not just good intentions.

This is where many organisations fall short. The intent is there. The follow-through is not. Development conversations happen once a year in a formal review process, potential leaders are identified and then left to figure things out for themselves, and the pipeline that looked healthy on paper turns out to be largely theoretical when a senior role actually needs to be filled.

Organisations that are serious about this tend to treat it the way they treat any other commercial priority: with clear ownership, regular review, and honest assessment of whether it is actually working. The commercial rigour that BCG applies to go-to-market strategy is the same rigour that leadership pipeline management deserves.

What Good Assessment Looks Like in a Marketing Context

Marketing leadership has some specific requirements that general leadership frameworks do not always capture well. A marketing leader needs to be able to hold creative judgment and commercial accountability simultaneously. They need to be credible with both the people producing the work and the senior stakeholders who are funding it. They need to understand data well enough to challenge it, not just report it.

When assessing potential leaders in a marketing environment, I look for a few things beyond the general qualities already covered. Can they explain a complex channel decision in plain language to someone who does not understand marketing? Can they defend a budget recommendation with commercial logic rather than industry convention? Do they understand the difference between activity and outcome, and do they hold their teams to that distinction?

The pipeline thinking that underpins modern GTM strategy applies equally to talent. You need to know where your future marketing leaders are coming from before you need them. Waiting until a senior role is vacant to start thinking about succession is a reactive approach that rarely ends well.

There is also something worth saying about the difference between identifying potential and creating the conditions for it to develop. Some people with genuine leadership capability never get the chance to demonstrate it because the organisation around them does not create the right environment. The assessment process matters, but so does what comes after it.

If your growth strategy depends on building stronger commercial capability across your marketing function, you will find the broader thinking on structure, investment, and team design in the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub useful context for how leadership development fits into the larger picture.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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