How to Build a Stronger Leadership Pipeline with Smarter Systems
There's a person in your organization right now who is ready to lead. Maybe they've been quietly mastering their craft for years. Maybe they just raised their hand for a tough assignment and nailed it. Maybe they're in a committee waiting for more responsibility.Do you know who they are?This is a central challenge many organizations face in leadership development. You can have the best program in the world, but without accurate, up-to-date information on your people, it’s hard to pinpoint your best future leaders. For most organizations, that information simply isn't accessible. It's scattered across disconnected platforms, buried in manual tracking tools, and rarely up to date. This makes it nearly impossible to make confident, data-driven decisions about who's ready to lead.Static Systems Can't Develop Dynamic People
Leadership development is deeply personal. It requires truly understanding your people’s arc, including where they started, how they've grown, what they've accomplished, and where they want to go next.
"You hire someone for a role, but after 12 years, is that the same person?” asks Derek Haese, Assistant Vice President of Business Development at Lineup. “Hopefully not. Are they just supposed to stay in that role forever? You need a system that's going to move with you."
When organizations prioritize leadership development, the impact is real. According to the Center for Creative Leadership, employee retention is 20 times greater at companies with a focus on leadership development, and businesses with strategic leadership programs are nearly twice as likely to respond rapidly when facing an unpredictable environment.
But to get to this place with a strong pipeline requires a strong foundation. If the tools you are relying on are not built with people development in mind, it can make that foundation shaky.
Here are three strategies to help your organization develop your volunteers and your talent into a leadership pipeline that will serve you for years to come.
Three Ways to Build a Stronger Leadership Pipeline
1. Know What Your Candidate Pool is Capable Of
Don't wait for a leadership vacancy to start assessing your people. Implement a formal intake process that captures more than someone's current role.
Gather insight into their broader skills, past experiences, and professional goals. From there, establish clear criteria for what emerging leadership looks like in your organization and consistently evaluate how your people align to those criteria over time.
2. Stop Running Programs in Silos and Manage Them Like a System
If your mentoring sessions, leadership workshops, and development programs are living in separate tools or inboxes, you're losing visibility into who’s engaging with these programs the most.
Organize participants into dedicated groups and track their engagement and progress over time. Historical data matters here, and knowing how someone moved through a previous program tells you a lot about how to support their next stage of development.
3. Build a Feedback Loop that Improves Your Initiatives
Running an evaluation at the end of a program is only useful if you do something with it. After each cohort, gather structured feedback from participants on what worked, what fell short, and where they felt underprepared.
Layer that with performance data from the program itself, and then use both to make adjustments before the next cycle.
Remember, the organizations with the strongest leadership pipelines are not running the same program on repeat. They're refining continuously.
Your Next Leaders Are Already in the Room
Every organization needs systems to find its best people and invest in their leadership potential. Without clean, centralized data, that process relies on memory, gut instinct, and whoever happens to be top of mind. Unfortunately, that's how great leaders get overlooked.
Lineup changes that equation.
When everything you know about your people lives in one place – their history, their growth, their performance, their goals – you stop losing time searching and start spending it on what actually matters: developing the people right in front of you.
