Nov
30
2007
(21804) Ram Charan says:
Someone with know-how selects and develops other leaders who can take their place when the time is right. They build a team of people who can get things done rather than trying to do it all themselves.
Fostering Future Leaders
One sure indicator of someone with know-how is that they always leave their organization stronger than how they found it. They have a real talent for spotting and then developing new leadership talent. They actively search for people with latent leadership potential, create growth opportunities where these people can leverage and deepen their abilities and allow them to grow progressively stronger. This makes their organizations stronger and more flexible because there is a deep pool of leadership talent available.
Your job as a leader is to get the job done, not to try and do everything yourself. The only way you can achieve this consistently is by growing other leaders, or more specifically by building a pipeline of future leaders. In this way, you won’t have to deal with every issue yourself.
Managing Talent Appropriately
Many organizations start with a job description and then find the right person to fill that opening. Someone with know-how reverses that dynamic. They spot leadership talent early and then create a career path that will give that individual room to grow and develop. As these individuals take on progressively more complex challenges, they then become more competent to take on a greater role in the business in the future. This is more than conducting an annual performance review. Instead, it requires that you create a view about the person’s current competencies and then match that person’s weak areas with challenging stretch assignments that will promote personal growth.
So how can you achieve this in practice?
Become better at spotting leadership talent in others–by observing their actions, decisions and behaviors up close. Keep in mind that you will have personal biases of your own, so you constantly need to cross-check your thinking with others.
Try pooling your observations about others–so you get a fuller and more accurate picture of each individual’s positive and negative attributes. Muster evidence and probe beyond generalities when you consider what a person brings to the table in this way.
Be prepared to “drill down”–and get to the truth about a person. This may be a matter of keeping notes about multiple meetings, or you may need to talk with the people they work with in depth. Go beyond superficial observations and get down to the real nitty-gritty details before making a judgement.
Develop your future leaders effectively–by both clarifying what path they need to follow to grow and what they need to be working on in their current job. Don’t be so focused on the opportunities of the future that you fail to notice their current shortcomings. Help people see what aspects of their current performance need to be enhanced if they are to reach their full potential. Have regular face-to-face dialogues where you spell out what’s going well and what isn’t. Over a period of time, these discussions will be very helpful and worthwhile.
Establish clear non-negotiable criteria–so they genuinely understand what each job requires them to do to succeed. If you make these lists of criteria too long, you cause confusion. Focus like a laser on what really matters, spell that out and then let the person use their own initiative.
Find constructive ways to deal with any mismatches that occur–because you can never really be sure what will happen when dealing with people. Some will rise to the challenges placed before them but others will fail miserably. There are all kinds of reasons for this but at the end of the day, you’d better be prepared and willing to deal with any problems that are generated. This may be a case of finding them another position that is a better match to their talents or making it clear to the person that their future lies elsewhere.As previously mentioned, the genuine acid test of your judging know-how is whether or not you succeed in building a pipeline of future leaders. This is more than merely specifying your criteria for future leaders. It also goes well beyond spending money on training and development programs. You have to work with others to identify the leaders of the future and make sure they receive assignments that will stretch their abilities and expand their knowledge. They need to be exposed to a wide variety of markets, cultures, consumers and business models. And their ongoing progress needs to be tracked and monitored regularly.
Know-How
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