How do you build bench strength in your team?

That gap has a name. It’s bench strength, and when you lead managers, building it is part of your job.

What is bench strength in leadership?

Bench strength is how many people in your team could step into a bigger role, including yours, and how soon. It’s a measure of depth: whether the team keeps leading itself when a leader moves on, moves up or is away for a long time.

The term comes from sport, where a strong bench means the substitutes can play. At work it covers two things. The first is coverage: if you went tomorrow, would someone hold the role well enough that nothing important stalls? The second is the pipeline: who is growing towards your role over the next year or two, even if they couldn’t do it today?

Many organisations treat this as an HR exercise, a name in a box once a year. Gallup’s de Koning puts it bluntly in his piece on bench strength: “most organizations apply little or no rigor to identifying and grooming their top players.” The same article argues that “Development must be ongoing, not a once-a-year event.” That’s the shift for a leader of managers. Your bench isn’t a form you fill in. It’s what you do every week with the people under you.

Why is your bench weaker than you think?

Because most of the people you’d call “nearly ready” have been nearly ready for a while. Readiness labels tend to stick, and the work that would change them rarely gets scheduled.

Writing in Chief Executive, Matt Paese of the leadership consultancy DDI describes a day-long talent review where the label “ready with development” came up again and again. Of the leaders who carried it, he notes: “Many had carried the tag for several years or more.” His point is that managers assume a leader moves from nearly ready to ready just by doing their current job well. In his words: “They seldom do.”

The wider picture isn’t encouraging either. Paese reports that “In 2011, 18 percent of organizations around the world reported strong bench strength,” and that the figure has since fallen, with “only 12 percent with strong benches today.” Those numbers describe organisations, not your team, and they come from DDI’s own forecast research. But they match what most leaders of managers find when they sit down and try to name names.

There’s a second trap: confusing a great performer with a ready successor. Gallup’s research on why great managers are rare found that companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the job 82% of the time. Managers told Gallup they were picked for “their success in a previous non-managerial role or their tenure.” The same thing happens one level up. The manager who runs the tightest team is not automatically the one who could run yours.

How do you tell ready now from ready in a year?

Look at what each person has actually done of your job, not how well they do their own. Ready now means they’ve already handled most of the hard parts, at least for a spell. Ready in a year means they have the judgement but are missing a few specific experiences.

A useful way in is to list the five or six things that make your role hard. Not the job description: the parts that keep you up at night. For a leader of managers that list often looks like this:

• Making the call when two of your managers want opposite things.
• Owning a relationship with a senior stakeholder or another department.
• Managing the money: the budget, the headcount, the trade-offs.
• Having the hard conversation with a struggling manager.
• Holding the line with your own boss when the team is stretched.
• Setting direction for the next six months, not just running this one.

Then, for each person, ask a plain question: have they done this, even once, with real stakes? Not watched you do it. Not helped prepare for it. Done it.

That gives you three rough buckets:

1. Ready now: they’ve done most of the list and you’d trust them with your role next month, with a few rough edges.
2. Ready in a year: they’ve done some of the list and you can name the two or three experiences they’re missing.
3. Not yet: they’re strong in their current role, but the gap to yours is wide, or they’ve told you it isn’t what they want.

“Not yet” isn’t a judgement on anyone’s worth. Some of your best people will sit there for good reasons, including that they love the job they have. The buckets describe your view of readiness for one role, today. They’re a starting point for a conversation, not a verdict.

How do you move someone from ready in a year to ready now?

Give them the hard part of your job before they have the job, and back them while they learn it. Readiness is built by doing, with you close enough to catch them but far enough away that it’s really theirs.

Paese’s fix for the “ready with development” trap is specificity. He argues that naming the exact experiences someone needs matters “because they trigger action,” on both sides. A vague note that someone “needs more exposure” never gets scheduled. “Runs the quarterly budget review in March, with me in the room but not speaking” does.

A few moves that work well for people in the middle bucket:

• Hand over a meeting you always chair. Let them run it for a quarter. Sit in for the first one, then stop coming.
• Give them a decision you usually make, with a clear limit. If you’re working on letting go more broadly, our post on why managers struggle to delegate covers the habits that pull work back to you.
• Introduce them to your hardest stakeholder, then let them own the next piece of work with that person.
• Make them cover for you properly when you’re away. Not “call me if anything comes up”. Actually unreachable, with their name on the decisions.

The common thread is that each move carries real stakes. If nothing can go wrong, they won’t learn much from it.

What does a bench map look like for a real team?

Here’s a hypothetical example. A head of operations leads four team managers. We’ll call them A, B, C and D, which is how the test suggests you list people too.

She writes down the hard parts of her role: the budget, the relationship with the sales director, cutting projects when capacity runs out, the conversation with a struggling manager, and the six-month plan. Then she goes through each person.

• A has been the obvious name for two years. When she checks the list, though, A has never touched the budget and has never been in the room with the sales director. A runs the best team, but has done almost none of her job. Honest bucket: ready in a year. The move: A owns the next quarter’s budget submission, with one review session before it goes in.
• B is quieter and less senior, but covered for her during a long leave last year. B made two hard prioritisation calls and handled a difficult conversation with a manager on another team. Honest bucket: ready now, with gaps in direction-setting. The move: B drafts the six-month plan and presents it to the leadership team.
• C is excellent at the work and has said more than once that managing managers doesn’t appeal. Bucket: not yet, and that’s fine. The move: ask C directly what they want to grow into next, and stop assuming.
• D joined six months ago. Too early to tell. Bucket: not yet. The move: put D in one room each month where they’re the least experienced person.

The surprise is that her closest candidate isn’t the one she’d have named in the planning meeting. B is. A is still a strong prospect, but a year away, and nothing in A’s current job will close that gap without a deliberate move.

That’s what a bench map is for. Not to rank people, but to replace a gut feeling with a short list of named, dated actions.

Who could step into your role?

The closest candidate is the person who has already done the most of your job, not the person you like best or who has been around longest. Often it’s someone who covered for you once, because cover is the only time most people get to try the role for real.

If no one is close, that’s worth knowing, not worth hiding. It usually means you’ve been holding on to the hard parts yourself. That’s common. When you lead managers, the hard parts are often the bits you’re best at and most enjoy, which makes them the hardest to hand over.

Ask yourself one more question: if your closest candidate had to take over next month, which single experience would you most want them to have had first? That’s the first move on your list.

For an executive-level view of the same question, our Succession Ready page looks at whether a credible successor exists for a senior role and when they could step up. And if your direct reports have grown to the point where you can’t give each of them stretch work, the Span Check calculator is a quick way to see whether your team is simply too big.

Should you tell people where they sit on your bench?

Talk about growth, not buckets. Tell people what you think they’re capable of and what you’d like them to try next. Don’t tell anyone they’re your successor, and don’t share the map itself.

People rarely know you rate them unless you say so. A sentence like “I think you could do a version of my job one day, and I’d like you to run the budget review to start finding out” is honest and motivating. It names a move without making a promise.

What you shouldn’t do is promise the job. Plans change, organisations restructure and people change their minds, including you. A promise you later break costs far more trust than an encouraging conversation ever earns. If you’re leading managers for the first time and still working out how much to share, the managers of managers hub collects our other tests and posts for this stage.

How do you map your own bench?

Write it down, person by person, against the hard parts of your role. Doing it in your head lets the obvious name win by default.

Bench Strength is a free self-test that takes about 5 minutes and needs no sign-up. You list up to eight people, using initials if you like, and rate each one on a few readiness questions. Names stay in your browser. You get a bench map with three buckets, ready now, ready in a year and not yet, with one move for each person, plus who could step into your role: your closest candidate today.

The map is your view of readiness, not a verdict on anyone on it. It’s only as good as the honesty you bring, and it will change as soon as you start making the moves. That’s the point.

For a wider read on your own habits, including how often you give people work they’re not quite ready for, try The 42 Test.

Bench strength isn’t something you find out you have when someone leaves. It’s something you build, one hard hand-over at a time, long before anyone needs it.