November 2004 Leadership Coaching Newsletter
This Month's Topic: Leadership Pipeline
I just read an interesting book called, "The Leadership Pipeline, How to Build the Leadership-Powered Company" by Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter and James Noel. This book is very helpful to those individuals and organizations that are focused on building their own internal leaders.
The authors' premise is that today's businesses compete equally on the strength of their intellectual capital as on that of their financial capital. The intellectual capital resides in employees at all levels in the company and having strong leadership is necessary to fully enable it.
The often complicated task of building and managing top talent is broken down by the authors into a simple system for ensuring a full and flowing pipeline of leaders now and for the future, an essential component of succession planning. The book is full of practical advice and easy models to follow that focus on six critical leadership passages and specifically what development is critical at each stage in order for a leader to deliver bottom line and people management results.
Although hiring outside gifted talent may make sense as a tactic, it is not a smart long-term strategy, as finding the right type of leaders with the right type of skills is becoming an increasingly difficult task.
The instruction in this book is very useful especially within many organizations where the lack of effective talent development has contributed to a real deficit of skilled leaders. As many of us are aware, several companies over the last ten years have dramatically reduced their investment in talent development in order to manage expenses. This deficit has created numerous executives that have not been fully trained or developed for their roles.
Organizations need to look at development as an integral piece of the business strategy. Leadership development must be viewed not only as "work that need to get done" but must include developmental assignments. We must acknowledge the different levels of leadership and that people need to learn how to develop core competencies, skills, value transitions, and experiences at each level in order to be successful. We cannot assume that if an individual performs well in one leadership role that they will likely perform well at the next one without training, coaching and additional development.
It is no surprise to me that in many organizations the leadership pipeline is empty. If we are to have more leaders at every level in our organizations, then we need to adopt a strategy to build those leaders. To develop leadership potential, we need to match the level of leadership with the individual's potential and a series of skill, experiences, competency and value shifting requirements that will ensure the building of the leadership base and ultimately the pipeline.
Leadership Coaching Newsletter is written and produced by Wendy Capland. If you have any questions or comments, please send them to: wcapland@visionquestconsulting.com. We'd love to hear from you.
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