Despite the increasing
importance of leadership to business success, the on-the-job experiences of
most people actually seem to undermine the development of attributes needed for
leadership. Nevertheless, some companies have consistently demonstrated an
ability to develop people into outstanding leader-managers. Recruiting people
with leadership potential is only the first step. Equally important is managing
their career patterns. Individuals who are effective in large leadership roles often
share a number of career experiences. Perhaps the most typical and most
important is significant challenge early in a career. Leaders almost always
have had opportunities during their twenties and thirties to actually try to
lead, to take a risk, and to learn from both triumphs and failures. Such
learning seems essential in developing a wide range of leadership skills and
perspectives. It also teaches people something about both the difficulty of
leadership and its potential for producing change. Later in their careers, something
equally important happens that has to do with broadening. People who provide
effective leadership in important jobs always have a chance, before they get
into those jobs, to grow beyond the narrow base that characterizes most
managerial careers. This is usually the result of lateral career moves or of
early promotions to unusually broad job assignments. Sometimes other vehicles
help, like special task-force assignments or a lengthy general management course.
Whatever the case, the breadth of knowledge developed in this way seems to be
helpful in all aspects of leadership. So does the network of relationships that
is often acquired both inside and outside the company. When enough people get opportunities
like this, the relationships that are built also help create the strong
informal networks needed to support multiple leadership initiatives. Corporations
that do a better-than-average job of developing leaders put an emphasis on creating
challenging opportunities for relatively young employees. In many businesses, decentralization
is the key. By definition, it pushes responsibility lower in an organization and
in the process creates more challenging jobs at lower levels. Johnson &
Johnson, 3M, Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, and many other well-known companies
have used that approach quite successfully. Some of those same companies also
create as many small units as possible so there are a lot of challenging lower
level general management jobs available. Sometimes these businesses develop
additional challenging opportunities by stressing growth through new products
or services. Over the years, 3M has had a policy that at least 25% of its
revenue should come from products introduced within the last five years. That
encourages small new ventures, which in turn offer hundreds of opportunities to
test and stretch young people with leadership potential. Such practices can,
almost by themselves, prepare people for small and medium-sized leadership
jobs. But developing people for important leadership positions requires more
work on the part of senior executives, often over a long period of time. That
work begins with efforts to spot people with great leadership potential early
in their careers and to identify what will be needed to stretch and develop
them. Again, there is nothing
magic about this process. The methods successful companies use are surprisingly
straightforward. They go out of their way to make young employees and people at
lower levels in their organizations visible to senior management. Senior
managers then judge for themselves who has potential and what the development
needs of those people are. Executives also discuss their tentative conclusions
among themselves to draw more accurate judgments. Armed with a clear sense of
who has considerable leadership potential and what skills they need to develop,
executives in these companies then spend time planning for that development. Sometimes
that is done as part of a formal succession planning or high-potential development
process; often it is more informal. In either case, the key ingredient appears
to be an intelligent assessment of what feasible development opportunities fit
each candidate’s needs. To encourage managers to participate in these
activities, well-led businesses tend to recognize and reward people who successfully
develop leaders. This is rarely done as part of a formal compensation or bonus
formula, simply because it is so difficult to measure such achievements with
precision. But it does become a factor in decisions about promotion, especially
the most senior levels, and that seems to make a big difference. When told that
future promotions will depend to some degree on their ability to nurture leaders,
even people who say that leadership cannot be developed somehow find ways to do
it. Such strategies help create a corporate culture where people value strong
leadership and strive to create it. Just as we need more people to provide
leadership; in the complex organizations that dominate our world today, we also
need more people to develop the cultures that will create that leadership. Institutionalizing
a leadership-centered culture is the ultimate act of leadership.
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