Real Leaders Don't Boss (29 page)

As a testament to the program's success, 90 percent of GE's top 600 leaders have been promoted from within the company. They have to be doing something right!

Many corporations mistakenly act as if building leadership means hiring talent from top-shelf consulting companies or hiring up-and-comers from the best academic institutions. Both are strategies that sap financial resources in tough and not-so-tough economic times; more important, neither strategy fills the bill.

Several years ago, I had just joined a large corporation and had aspirations of climbing the corporate ladder. As an enthusiastic new hire, I wanted to make the most of the opportunities the company offered. So I asked my boss what programs the company had to identify and develop future leaders from within the company. My obviously surprised and confused boss responded by saying that the company's current practice was to recruit talent from the outside. To spend institutional resources on leadership development, he said, would create unrest in the C-suite, lead to controversy because there would be “winners and losers,” and amount to showing preferential treatment in an otherwise-egalitarian environment. I didn't stay at that company very long. Any business, large or small, that prefers to recruit from the outside rather than groom and promote from within—intra-organizational leadership development—dooms itself to failure over the long haul.

Leadership learning shouldn't be confined only to upper echelons of corporations, either. Companies and their executives must develop an organizational culture that builds future leaders from the ground up, that teaches not only leadership skills, but also an understanding of business strategy and culture. That approach helps deliver lasting results and true innovation. The core of a diverse organization, after all, should be internally developed leaders who understand the business strategy and culture, and who have the staff and network to speed the delivery of work and the internal credibility to drive insightful change.

“The degree to which firms (small, medium and large) work on leadership development within an organization typically is directly correlated to an organization's continuity of strong leadership and management,” says Limoneira's Harold Edwards.
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Managing this discipline from the top down is a critical job of the CEO. Edwards offers a few thoughts on his approach to intra-organizational leadership development:

In any size organization, I feel it is important to embrace a process of defining critical leadership competencies for each managerial role within an organization. It is then important to identify and evaluate the actual competencies displayed by each manager within an organization and to compare them to the defined leadership competencies for each managerial role. This process will create a “gap analysis” that will identify areas of competency and leadership development requirements critical for tomorrow's leaders to display. Once these gaps are identified, it is easier to create leadership development programs that strengthen and enhance the competencies in which managers need to improve.
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Leadership in the 21st century is about leading at all levels, and not simply restricting it to job title, agrees Rick Lash, director of the Hay Group's Leadership and Talent Practice and co-leader of the Best Companies for Leadership Study. Among the Top 20 companies for leadership, 100 percent provide employees at every level of their organization the opportunity to develop the capabilities needed to lead others, according to their study released in early 2011. “Ninety percent of the Top 20 companies report that people are expected to lead regardless of whether they have a formal position of authority,” the study reports.
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Companies like the Hay Group's Top 20 empower their employees.
Empower
is a popular buzzword these days, and I have heard it grossly misused. The word literally means to give power or authority. But it implies many conditions that are often missed: How should power be transferred to individuals who are ready to take on the tasks and responsibilities of leadership? How are individuals made to feel that they are ready for this challenge? Empowerment should embody a serious approach to helping individuals gain experience, knowledge, and insight so they can successfully handle issues and problems on their own.

Don't be afraid to transfer pride of authorship, says Traverse City businessman Mark VanderKlipp, who has learned that essential lesson from many mentors in similar positions of authority. Along with his management team, VanderKlipp has achieved perhaps the most difficult aspect of managing a business—a transition in ownership from the founding group to a second generation—when he led the internal process of transition during an eight-year period that resulted in a structurally and financially successful shift to new ownership, something the firm's competitors are still grappling with. His next challenge will be selecting the third generation of firm leaders and
mentoring them to take over someday. That process has already begun.
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Whether a leader has won his or her “bars” on the battlefield, in the boardroom, or beyond, teaching and learning are life-long. Those who mentor and teach new leaders grow as leaders themselves. Larry Ames is one of those special leaders who have helped others develop. The now-retired sports editor of the
Ventura County Star
recounts his role in the formation of one such leader:

As assistant sports editor/schools at the
Boston Globe
from 1979-1994, one of my responsibilities was to hire, train, and supervise our college interns from colleges from across Greater Boston.... One year, as I was starting a hiring period, I received a phone call from B.J. Schecter, a freshman at Northeastern University in Boston. He said he was applying for one of the co-op positions in the sports department, and that I was going to hire him. I told Schecter that we normally didn't hire freshmen, because we wanted them to become
acclimated to college academic life before we would consider them. But I was fascinated by my conversation with Schecter and decided to hire him.

I was greatly rewarded by my decision. B.J. worked harder than anyone I had ever hired, and he listened and learned better, too. When B.J. graduated from college
Sports Illustrated
hired him as a researcher/reporter. B.J.'s hard work and determination has never waned. Today, he is executive editor of SI.com, the magazine's highly successful Website.

I never tried to figure out if Schecter was a born leader or someone who learned to lead. I do know that hiring him made me a better leader, and was an experiment which helped my leadership role and created several new leaders.
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Today's workplace suffers no shortage of “leaders-in-waiting,” young talent hoping to be identified, mentored, challenged, and developed by senior leadership. The shortage, instead, is in companies willing to make the commitment to leadership mentoring. Too few organizations recognize the competitive edge that can result from building this conduit or pipeline of future leaders. Real leaders recognize that the greater the number of quality ideas that emerge across various levels of a business, the greater the likelihood that better decisions will be made. The flattening of corporate leadership—in which leadership is spread across the organization and throughout all levels rather than concentrated in the hands of a few at the top—is occurring in today's top leadership companies, as reflected in the Hay Group study mentioned previously. To accomplish that, however, takes leadership training, and those companies that commit to it are the most successful.

The spectacular rise of the University of Southern California as an academic powerhouse during the past two decades is a prime example of what can happen with the right infrastructure—or leadership pipeline—in place. Rather than tap talent from top academic institutions, well-known military brass, or stalwart corporate giants such as GE, Boeing, IBM, Four Seasons, or Ritz-Carlton, the school's leadership opted to build future leaders internally, from the ground up. That way up-and-coming leaders would already understand the business—USC—and its strategy and culture.

Today's businesses, large and small, could do well by modeling their leadership pipeline after that of the U.S. military, specifically the U.S. Marines. Of course, bellowing drill sergeants, long runs in double time, and tactical weapons practice would not be on the agenda in future business leadership training. But strategic thinking, learning by doing, executing complex plans, figurative tactical weapons use, and so on, are lessons from the military that can be useful. Junior officers learn to be strategic thinkers, to develop and execute complex plans, to supervise and motivate enlisted personnel, to be accountable for expensive equipment, and to be calm under intense pressure. Learning by doing is also a critical aspect of training, as are regular counseling, critiquing, challenging, and correcting of performance by senior leaders. If the goals are to have employees who know the competition and the playing field, understand the objectives, are well-trained to achieve those objectives, and can accomplish them quickly and efficiently, then the Marines provide an excellent example of how to achieve them.

The right kind of built-in, orchestrated leadership training—the right leadership pipeline—is one way a company can differentiate itself from the competition and thus attract top talent. Consider the following sound approaches in developing your leaders for tomorrow. Try them, and your company will likely be more successful:

Develop bench strength.
Success in sports, as in business, requires a team of starters and those on the bench who can be called upon at critical times. This depth of talent wins championships and captures new business.

Develop leaders at every level of the organization.
Most organizations are complex and require talent development across the company. A reservoir of emerging leaders sustains an organization's culture and brand.