What Best in Class Companies Do To Grow Leaders: Part 2
- Author: Eric Jackson
- Posted: September 20, 2007
- Category: Talent Management
- Tags: No Tags
- Comments: 2
[Editor’s Note: In Part One, Eric elaborated on the leadership shortage. In the conclusion, he gives us an Action Plan.]
Part 2
Meet with your boss to discuss the results of the assessment and build an Action Plan.
Leadership Development programs fail if the leader’s boss is not involved. It’s critical to meet with the boss to discuss the strengths and weaknesses that were identified in the assessment. The leader is always interested to have the opportunity to hear how his/her boss sees his/her strengths and weaknesses. This meeting also needs to focus on building a Leadership Development Plan, which the leader and boss buy-in to and endorse.
Track the Leadership Development Action Plan over time.
What good is a plan if you don’t track it and do what you say you will do? The process of setting up and tracking this action plan forms the basis of the “Leadership Development Program” that the best-in-class companies follow. This program is separate from any performance review process. It is a supplement — not a replacement. In our work, we act as external coaches who come in and meet with the leader once a quarter to review progress over time (usually two years). The leader’s boss is kept in the loop by receiving updates of the plan on a quarterly basis and then coming back at the one-year and two-year marks to meet with the leader and external coach. Knowing that you are accountable for progress is a huge stimulant to the leader.
Encourage mentors in your organization - but don’t force them.
Mentors are great. Who hasn’t had someone take an interest in us at one point in our lives and give us some advice which was really valuable? Yet, a lot of organizations have tried to “assign” mentors to “high-potentials,” as part of their leadership development programs. This just doesn’t work. It’s like fixing up two people on a blind date who have nothing in common or are too busy to meet. The best approach we see is to have the leader and boss discuss some possible mentors (a lot of times the boss will have the best ideas because he/she knows a wider universe of people in the organization who might be interested and a good fit with the leader). Then the boss should contact the possible mentor, rather than the leader. We’ve seen successful mentor relationships where the two people meet once a year for dinner, and others where they meet every couple of months. It’s up to the two people. When it works, mentors can have a dramatic impact on “high-potential” leaders.
Discuss career path.
Many bosses don’t make time to sit down and discuss a “high-potential” leader’s future career path at that company. However, the ones who do can create tremendous loyalty. People appreciate it (even highly talented people who you might think get tired of all the acclaim they receive) when their boss closes the door and says “Let’s talk about what you want to accomplish here and how I can help.” Ideally, this career vision gets tied into the Leadership Development Plan.
Leadership Development is tough. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be having a “crisis.” Recruiting is an answer to a short-term need, but it doesn’t address the underlying problem. The best organizations understand that — buy into it whole-heartedly — and build systematic processes to ensure their best people know where they need to develop and what their future career path looks like at that company.
If you have any questions about how RCI Recruitment Solutions can help your organization grow the leaders of tomorrow, contact us today.
What Best in Class Companies Do To Grow Leaders
- Author: Eric Jackson
- Posted: September 18, 2007
- Category: Talent Management
- Tags: No Tags
- Comments: 0
Part 1
There have been numerous Fortune, Forbes, and BusinessWeek stories in the last year citing the importance of growing leaders within your organization, especially in respect to the demographic shift that will follow the retirement of the baby boomers. Paul Reilly–of the venerable Korn/Ferry–states in the Forbes article (linked above) that over 50% of all C-level execs will retire in the next 5 years.
That begs the question: what are organizations doing to prepare for this difficult challenge? In every crisis lies opportunity. And certainly, this immovable fact is good news for the Korn/Ferrys, Monsters, Jobsters, and Recruiting.coms of the world, as it suggests an increasing need from Corporate America for recruiting top talent.
However, the best organizations do not over-rely on recruiting firms to “fix” their lack-of-leadership problem. They look inside and set up processes and programs which ensure that their “Leadership Funnel” is as full as their “sales funnel.”
Of course, everyone pays homage to GE, when talking about leadership development. Yet, very few actually do a great job to coach, mentor, and develop top talent.
Here are some quick tips, based on our work with different organizations, on what the best companies do to ensure an adequate supply of leaders for years to come:
Leadership Development happens at multiple levels within the organization, not just below the C-Level.
We all like short cuts. Yet, we know that, in important areas, we can’t take short cuts. Developing an adequate supply of leaders is a long-term investment. The best companies understand that and work at bringing their people along no matter the level of the organization — from entry-level to the C-Suite.
Assess where leaders are at today to measure where they will be tomorrow.
You can’t improve something if you don’t measure it. Doing a leadership assessment at the front-end of any development program gives you a baseline to measure someone’s development — and hold them accountable if they don’t develop. 360s are great as a tool, but the most reliable measurement of a leader’s strengths and weaknesses comes from a process called an “Assessment Center” which uses multiple methods (including case studies, work simulations, and behavior-based interviews) to measure someone’s leadership performance and potential.
One thing that surprised me when I started to “coach” “high-potential” leaders is how many of them were hungry to know where they ranked relative to other leaders out there. Most people work for one company for a long time - sometimes 10, 15, or 20 years. They lose sight of their “market value” relative to other execs. Being able to tell them that they are in the top quartile on “strategic orientation” relative to others is very interesting to them, often raising their confidence levels. By contrast, it can be an eye-opener when they are in the bottom quartile on a number of important leadership dimensions.
In Part 2 we will develop an Action Plan, so you won’t want to miss it!
6 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make Managing Talent
- Author: Amitai Givertz
- Posted: August 31, 2007
- Category: Talent Management, Business Matters
- Tags: No Tags
- Comments: 0
Recruiting by Number: Friday, August 31st, 2007
- Attitude towards employees
- Haphazard hiring process
- No feedback, monitoring and evaluation
- Not communicating the organization’s vision and mission
- No marketing
- Survival mode
Source: Atlantic Canada’s Small Business Blog
24 Ways to Get Your Onboarding Program Started
- Author: Amitai Givertz
- Posted: August 30, 2007
- Category: Talent Management, Employee Retention
- Tags: No Tags
- Comments: 0
Recruiting by Numbers: Thursday, August 3oth, 2007
Goals for Onboarding
- Make world-class the goal.
- Shorten new-hire time to productivity.
- Create competitive advantage.
- Integrate and coordinate all onboarding efforts.
- Create a competitive advantage.
- Reinforce the employment brand.
- Make management expectations clear.
- Involve family to bolster retention.
- Gather referral names.
- Keep new hires from changing their minds.
- Improve the recruiting process.
- Meet diverse needs.
- Have global capabilities
Strategic Design Components
- A “pre-start” component.
- An extended onboarding process.
- The manager is present.
- The CEO is present.
- Online capability.
- No delay in offering onboarding.
- Opportunities to ask “stupid” questions.
- The process periodically identifies frustrations.
- A growth plan is provided.
- Debriefing to improve.
- Culture is reinforced through examples.
Dr. John Sullivan, ERE
12 Best Recruiting Practices to Copy
- Author: Amitai Givertz
- Posted: August 14, 2007
- Category: Recruiting, Talent Management
- Tags: No Tags
- Comments: 1
Recruiting by Numbers: Tuesday, August 14th, 2007
- Valero’s business-case model.
- MGM Grand’s employment branding.
- The U.S. Army’s use of video games for recruiting.
- Google’s employment branding.
- Booz Allen’s boomerang recruiting effort.
- Allianz Life’s service-level agreement.
- Bank of America’s retreat from outsourcing.
- Dell’s measurement dashboard and superior measure of quality of hire.
- Valero’s college recruiting.
- World-class corporate recruiting websites.
Dr. John Sullivan, ERE
Talent Management: Ten Tips Checklist
- Author: Amitai Givertz
- Posted: July 24, 2007
- Category: Recruiting, Talent Management
- Tags: Recruiting by Numbers
- Comments: 0
Recruiting by Numbers: Tuesday, July 24th, 2007
- Clearly identify the requirements of any job you are trying to fill.
- Work with HR to ensure that your job posting is appropriate.
- If you are hiring a person for your team, conduct a mini gap analysis to identify competencies and skills you would like to gain with a hire, in addition to minimum qualifications for the job.
- Don’t make a hiring decision based only on one competency, such as technical skill.
- Leverage, where possible, existing tools to get the most potential (and qualified) applicants available.
- Leverage those same tools to filter unqualified people from the hiring process.
- Provide consistent on-boarding for each new hire.
- Implement solid leadership training for management in your organization.
- Provide assessments of competence for employees and managers regularly, with action plans for improvement.
- Find your replacement, hire people smarter than yourself.
Darin E. Hartley, Digital Beat: Talent Management Tools
Top Ten Talent Retention Tips
- Author: Amitai Givertz
- Posted: July 11, 2007
- Category: Talent Management, Employee Retention
- Tags: Recruiting by Numbers
- Comments: 0
Recruiting by Numbers: Wednesday, July 11th, 2007
- Show genuine interest and appreciation.
- Make work meaningful.
- Ask courageous questions.
- Grow competencies, situationally.
- Meet one-on-one, routinely.
- Make retention everyone’s responsibility.
- Be a career builder.
- Help people get an “ A.”
- Manage the meaning of change.
- Walk your talk.
Source: Craig Donaldson, Human Resources
9 Tips for Retaining Your Best Workers
- Author: Amitai Givertz
- Posted: July 5, 2007
- Category: Talent Management, Employee Retention
- Tags: Recruiting by Numbers, STREAMline Recruiter Training
- Comments: 0
Recruiting by Numbers: Thursday, July 5th, 2007
- Start by hiring smart
- Clarify expectations
- Get to know your employees
- Give feedback
- Make retention part of your company culture
- Educate and train
- Offer incentives and rewards
- Empower employees.
- Give performance updates and evaluations
Source: Daisy Saunders, HR.BLR.com
Talent Management or Brand Management?
- Author: Amitai Givertz
- Posted: June 13, 2007
- Category: Talent Management, Employment Branding
- Tags: Employee Engagement, Employee Retention, Employment Branding
- Comments: 3
From The Impassioned Workforce…
In my professional capacity I operate in the field of Marketing and Business Development, helping the organisation establish and grow its brand presence and convert prospects to advocates. Why then, some might ask, am I speaking/writing about employee engagement, recruitment and retention issues and other such stuff? Surely these are HR topics and belong to the realm of human capital experts? But not so. These topics are critical to everyone wishing for the success and longevity of an organisation, and with brand equity increasingly becoming the domain of the CEO, it is vital that everyone plays a part in creating and sustaining an impassioned workforce.
Smart Leadership, Part 2
- Author: Eric Jackson
- Posted: April 19, 2007
- Category: Talent Management, Business Matters
- Tags: Center of Excellence, Leadership Training, Performance Management, Succession Planning
- Comments: 0
This week I draw to a close this four-part excerpt from the book Why Smart Executives Fail, co-authored with Sydney Finkelstein. In the book we examine why smart executives fail, the early warning signs for corporate disasters, keys to leadership success and failure, learning from mergers and acquisitions and lessons for board of director effectiveness.
In the last post — Smart Leadership, Part 1 — I started out with the first four skill-sets that describe the Three Pillars of a “Smart Organization:” Smart Leadership:
The first commonality we found across Smart Organizations was that they possessed “Smart Leadership” at the Executive Team and Board levels. The “smart” label doesn’t reflect their collective IQ (although all would have scored highly). Instead, what made their teams and boards “smart” was a combination of certain individual skill-sets that each officer and director possessed, none of these organizations had “Imperial CEOs” with thousands of faceless followers. Rather, they had teams, boards, and leaders throughout the organization who were the stars of the show. These officers and directors had skill-sets, knowledge, attitudes and behaviors that were in place in “Smart Organizations” but were conspicuously absent in successful companies who later headed towards failure.
Here are the balance of skill-sets from last week’s post…
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