Filling the Leadership Pipeline. Robert B. Kaiser

Part 3: Considerations about Development Systems

      The final part includes two chapters relevant to the content, processes, and tools organizations use to develop talent. First, Skip Leonard of Personnel Decisions International builds on Freedman’s pathways-and-crossroads model and makes an important point regarding the content of talent development efforts. From over twenty-five years of experience in dozens of organizations and with hundreds of managers at all levels, Leonard has made a striking observation: in the haste to turn every manager into a leader, fundamental management skills have been largely overlooked (for example, planning, delegation, follow-up, project management). The startling result is that senior executives regularly enter advanced leadership courses lacking the basic building blocks of management. He grounds this observation and his alternative recommendation in strong leadership theory—like John Kotter’s classic distinction between leadership and management—as well as a great deal of statistical research on the distinction between transformational and transactional styles of leadership. Leonard’s central message is that leadership development interventions need to be tailored to the particular organizational level and that adopting a “one best way” approach to development, although seductively simplifying, is ultimately shortsighted. Leonard concludes his chapter by helping HR/OD&E professionals take a more strategic approach to answering the question of ROI.

      The fifth and final chapter in this volume is by Jennifer Martineau, Greg Laskow, and Lisa Moye of the Center for Creative Leadership, and their collaborator at the Central Intelligence Agency, Dick Phillips. They describe how they helped the CIA use leader development to transform its culture. In particular, they demonstrate a fully integrated approach to creating a competency system for all levels of management. The system contains both consistent themes that cut across all layers of management as well as unique themes that capture the particular challenges facing supervisors, middle managers, and executives. The case vividly illustrates design principles, strategies, and tactics for building a model of leadership that serves as the central architecture guiding all leader development initiatives. They show how this “customized integration” competency model specifies the content of training and development, provides a basis for receiving 360-degree feedback, and identifies the metrics for evaluating impact, the ROI in leadership development.

       Final Comments

      It is an honorable challenge to be responsible for ensuring your organization’s continuity and sustainability by preparing the next generations of leaders. May you find much to pick from in the following buffet of essential insights from respected practitioners. It is our highest hope that this volume will provide you with practical suggestions, creative ideas, and inspiration for new initiatives.

      I would like to thank the Center for Creative Leadership, long a pioneer in the development of leaders, for providing this forum, in which the field’s leading institutions can pool together their collective wisdom for the benefit of those charged with the responsibility of building the leaders of tomorrow.

       Building the Executive Ranks: Current Practices in Developing Future Business Leaders

      Patricia M. Weik

      RHR International Company

      If there is an emerging constant on the business horizon, it is that companies can expect to face a world of increasing complexity, uncertainty, and competitive pressure. As businesses prepare themselves strategically for this future, some companies—from market leaders like Gillette and Best Buy to small professional firms and local chambers of commerce—have put a sharp focus on increasing their supply of leaders capable of meeting these challenges. These forward-thinking organizations are learning through real-time applications about what works and, just as important, what doesn’t in the race to build leadership capacity.

      RHR International Company is a firm of management psychologists who have been consulting with current and future leaders of companies around the globe for sixty years. We designed the ExecutiveBench Research Program¹ (see exhibit 1.1, page 8) to identify emerging practices in the development of future leaders. Like most benchmarking efforts, we wanted to identify new, innovative models and practices that others might find useful. And we also were interested in identifying areas for improvement—those practices that companies are struggling to effectively implement. In this chapter, I describe the multiphase research effort and present key findings we discovered in the first phase, including a summary of the current state of executive bench strength and best practices in the identification and development of future leaders.

      This chapter is structured around four key areas of inquiry. First, we examine the emerging state of the talent market. Here we address questions such as the following: How concerned are companies about the changes in the talent market? How many senior leaders are expected to depart in the next five years? How confident are companies that they can meet their future growth needs by developing leaders?

      The second key area this chapter treats concerns how prepared companies are to meet future needs for leadership. This section covers questions such as the following: How effective are companies’ development programs for future leaders? What is the commitment of senior management to growing future leaders?

Exhibit 1.1. Key Findings from the RHR International Company Benchmarking Study

      • Most companies are not very confident in their ability to meet future growth needs.

      • In most companies talent development is still considered to be a project or program, not a way of doing business.

      • Organizations want leaders who have the courage to make the right decisions and who get business done by building strong relationships and inspiring others to drive necessary change.

      • Managers of future leaders will play a critical role in development, but most companies are not prepared to fully leverage this resource.

      • Uncovering best practices continues to be a challenge, in part because most companies still struggle to measure the effectiveness of their current leadership development practices.

      The third area under consideration is best practices that are evolving in the identification and development of future leaders, as well as areas for improvement. We address these questions: What characteristics are companies looking for in their leaders? How are future leaders being identified? How do companies communicate with future leaders (and others)? What experiences have been found to be most important in growing future leaders?

      Finally, the last area of inquiry is how to assess the impact and calculate the value added from investments in the future. How are companies measuring the effectiveness of their development processes? And how is the value to the company ascertained?

       The ExecutiveBench Research Program

       Research Goals

      A growing body of literature published over the past decade has focused on how companies successfully grow leaders for the long term. The McKinsey report, “The War for Talent” (Chambers, Foulon, Handfield-Jones, Hankin, & Michaels, 1998), makes the case that high-performing companies consistently develop and reward their highest-performing employees, while High Flyers (McCall, 1998), The Leadership Pipeline (Charan, Drotter, & Noel, 2001), and Voice of the Leader (Corporate Leadership Council, 2001) explore, among other issues, what experiences best prepare young managers for the increased responsibility of senior leadership. At RHR International, our direct experience in consulting with hundreds of companies of all sizes has confirmed what the literature suggests: companies are taking very seriously the issue of developing future leaders and making it a strategic priority.

      As companies are focusing increasingly on talent development, they are asking for guidance as to the best practices in developing leaders with high potential. And their questions about best practices are becoming more specific: How many individuals should be in a development program? How should they be selected? Do you tell them they are on a high potential list?