The effectiveness of penitentiary activities, assuming the authoritarianism of the management system, is largely determined by the individual and personal characteristics of unit heads of the penal system, who need to show their managerial abilities as fully as possible, but not every leader has a sufficient amount of such abilities. If he/she does, he/she cannot always demonstrate them to the fullest extent. In this case, there can be serious miscalculations, leading to certain socio-psychological and criminological consequences. Among them, the instability of the socio-psychological climate in a team, provoking a high employee turnover, which does not allow forming the key personnel of a unit, as well as a high risk that subordinate employees, projecting the style, manner of communication and affects of the management, begin to show socially disapproving and even self-destructive forms of behavior, such as various forms of aggression towards oneself and others, neglect of safety requirements at work and in everyday life, unlawful actions against convicts, etc. One of the most important factors in the prevention of these phenomena is the system of work with a personnel reserve for managerial positions. The arsenal of diagnostic tools for the study of 65 employees working in the penal system, who are middle managers in the personnel reserve, included a set of methods: a) analysis of documents; b) expert assessment of the employee’s personality; c) psychological testing, which allows obtaining a generalized psychological profile of a personality according to the estimates of five “traits of an adequate personality”, motivators of socio-psychological activity, the style of behavior self-regulation, levels of legal consciousness and faith in people, as well as self-assessment of professional development opportunities and career prospects. The generalized characteristics of the respondents show that 88% of them meet the requirements for penitentiary activities. The respondents have an average level of emotional intelligence development with a tendency to lower; their style of behavior self-regulation is accentuated due to their relatively poorly developed independence; 95% of respondents have a high and medium level of legal consciousness development; 70% of them are distinguished by their distrust of people; the leading motivator of their socio-psychological activity is success achievement. All surveyed employees see opportunities for their professional development, although about 30% of them have concerns about promotion opportunities in this system. Based on the results obtained, the resources of success and the four most important areas of work with the personnel reserve were identified.