Leaders at All Levels E-Book

Ram Charan

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: J-B US non-Franchise Leadership
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 266

Beschreibung

Learn how top companies solve the problem of leadership succession from corporate America's leading consultant. A serious crisis looms in American management today. More and more CEOs are failing; there remains an acute shortage of capable replacements. The true dilemma in leadership is the stagnant state of corporate leadership development. Because companies fail to hone their unit managers' leadership abilities, they are never able to fill their succession pipelines. With unit managers stagnating, companies have difficulty executing at every level, compounding the crisis. In I>Leaders at All Levels, bestselling author Ram Charan shows how top companies approach leadership development as a core competency, recognizing that an adaptable leadership pool is a competitive advantage, and focusing their attention on bringing out the best in the leaders they have. Charan reveals exactly what's wrong with corporate leadership development and tells how to make it right. He explains the concept of a leadership "gene pool" and shows how companies can discover just what "DNA" they need to succeed. He also details how to uncover the hidden leaders in a company, when and where to bring in fresh talent, how to coach, measure, and reward leadership, and much more. For CEOs, directors, and anyone involved in leadership development, Leaders at All Levels is an eye-opening guide on how to get succession right.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Ram Charan

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Rebuilding Succession and Leadership Development from the Ground Up

Chapter 1 - A NEW WAY TO FUND THE LEADERSHIP TALENT DEFICIT

Leadership Development Is Broken

How to Develop a Leader

The Big Leap to Profit-and-Loss Responsibility

Moving Forward by Stepping Back

The Leap to Strategy

Don’t Leave Leadership Development to Chance

Leadership Development Requires Radical Change

Chapter 2 - HOW APPRENTICESHIP TURNS POTENTIAL INTO LEADERS

Identify Leadership Talent Early and Correctly

Planning the Apprenticeship for Fast Growth

The Boss as Mentor

Challenges in Executing the Model

Choosing the Next CEO

Why the Apprenticeship Model Works

Chapter 3 - HOW TO RECOGNIZE LEADERSHIP POTENTIAL

Focusing on the Essentials

People Acumen

Business Acumen

Other Indicators of Leadership Potential

Diversity and DNA

Where to Find High-Potential Leaders

Don’t Leave Leadership to Chance

Chapter 4 - CUSTOMIZING LEADERS’ GROWTH PATHS

Development Paths That Allow for Leaps

Defining the Growth Path

Clearing the Path

Freedom to Fail

Chapter 5 - THE CRUCIAL ROLE OF BOSSES

Bosses as Mentors

Deliberate Feedback

Keeping Track of a Leader’s Growth

Dialogue as the Principal Tool

The One-Page Summary

The Growth Trajectory

Chapter 6 - MANAGING APPRENTICESHIP SYSTEMATICALLY

Monitoring the Leadership Pool

Chapter 7 - CHOOSING THE CEO WHO IS MOST LIKELY TO BE SUCCESSFUL

The Rewards of a Painstaking Process

Determining the Criteria

Identifying Candidates in Time

Making the Match

Helping the New CEO Succeed

Those Who Are Not Called

Chapter 8 - ADOPTING THE APPRENTICESHIP MODEL

Putting Succession and Leadership Development on the Agenda

Making Succession and Leadership Development Seamless

Breaking Barriers to Leadership Development

Unfinished Business

Epilogue

Appendix - BUILDING BLOCKS OF THE APPRENTICESHIP MODEL

Acknowledgments

About Ram Charan

Index

Ram Charan

Copyright © 2008 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Charan, Ram.

Leaders at all levels: deepening your talent pool to solve the succession crisis / Ram Charan.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-7879-8559-2 (cloth)

1. Leadership. 2. Executive succession—Planning. I. Title.

HD57.7.C47374 2008

658.4’092—dc22

2007026429

Dedicated to the hearts and souls of the joint family of twelve siblings and cousins living under one roof for fifty years whose personal sacrifices made my formal education possible.

Rebuilding Succession and Leadership Development from the Ground Up

Crisis may be an overused word, but it’s a fair description of the state of leadership in today’s corporations. CEOs are failing sooner and falling harder, leaving their companies in turmoil. At all levels, companies are short on the quantity and quality of leaders they need.

There’s no shortage of raw talent. Businesses could fill the leadership vacuum from their internal ranks if they knew how to spot and develop their real potential leaders. But they don’t, despite the enormous resources and thought they pour into the task.

The first law of holes—when you’re in one, stop digging—tells us what to do: abandon our traditional leadership development practices. They’re not working. Tinkering and fine-tuning won’t solve the fundamental problem. It’s time for a completely new approach to finding and developing the kinds of leaders businesses need. That’s what this book provides: a model for companies to reinvent their leadership development processes and for individual leaders to guide their own careers.

To fix the problem, you have to get to its root, which is the faulty conventional wisdom about what leadership is and how to improve it. I have some radically different, and doubtless controversial, views that are the foundation of the model presented here. Having observed how leaders develop, or fail to, over several decades, I have come to the following conclusions:

• Not everyone can become a leader. Leaders are different from everyone else in ways that no amount of classroom instruction can supply. Smartest, quickest, best performer—these and other superlatives are not useful in spotting those who have the raw talent for leadership. We have to stop using them. Leaders think and act differently. We can spot them if we know what to look for and sharpen our power of observation.

• Leadership ability is developed through practice and self-correction. People who have the talent for leadership must develop it. Their growth is accelerated when each new job lets them build their core capabilities and acquire new ones and when feedback is timely and precise. Repetitive practice of core skills hones judgment and paves the way for innovative ways to lead.

• The CEO job requires giant leaps in learning. Leaders will not be prepared to lead large companies unless each job is much more complex than the one before. Leaders must be immersed in complexity repeatedly in their careers. As they practice sorting through it, they learn to deal with it.

These tenets are the foundation of an approach to leadership development that focuses on spotting leaders early and putting them in situations that drive them to grow fast. The new approach transforms leadership development from a discrete activity run by the human resources staff to an everyday activity that is fully integrated into the fabric of the business and in which line leaders play a central role.

I call this approach the Apprenticeship Model. “Apprenticeship” may sound wrong for business executives, but it isn’t. Apprentices are people who learn from doing, and that is precisely what the Apprenticeship Model provides: practice, feedback, corrections, and more practice. It is designed to give each promising leader the opportunities that are right for him or her at the fastest pace of growth he or she can handle, defining the learning needed in each new job and making sure the learning in fact took place before helping the leader take the next step or leap forward. With this approach, leaders develop increasingly sophisticated and nuanced versions of their core capabilities in an astonishingly short time.

You will need to know at the earliest possible time what a leader’s true talents are. The first year is not too soon to start. Anyone with potential to be a leader is a “high potential.” But the most critical need of a company is to build the talent pool from which the CEO comes. This is where you extract an ounce of gold from a ton of ore. A successful succession process must have an explicit component for identifying leaders early who could someday be a CEO and tailoring their experiences, training, and development to both their individual talents and to the demands of that most challenging job.

The Apprenticeship Model vests huge responsibility in line leaders who supervise other leaders. Preparing future leaders becomes part of their job description, executed with the same rigor as strategy, finance, marketing, operations, and regulatory compliance. But developing leaders is not their task alone. It is a companywide priority. People throughout the organization create jobs, lend their observations, remove obstacles—whatever it takes to keep leaders growing.

This model of leadership development is radical and not for the fainthearted. It requires profoundly different attitudes and mind-sets as well as major organizational changes, and the results don’t come quickly. But it is eminently practical. It is based on decades of observation of hundreds of leaders in dozens of companies, ranging from small technology start ups to global giants like General Electric and Colgate-Palmolive from the American heartland to the middle of Mumbai. Is the effort worth it? Unquestionably. Companies that embrace the model or its tenets have built powerful talent engines that give them an edge.

This book provides concrete advice and real-world examples to help others make the change. It explains the processes and provides the tools that bring the Apprenticeship Model to life, as General Electric and Colgate-Palmolive have done and Novartis AG, Textron, and WellPoint, Inc., are doing. It is also a guide for aspiring leaders to develop their capabilities. Senior leaders bold enough to take it on will create a system and culture that continually strengthen leadership at all levels and that help them prepare for their own succession. This will be an enduring legacy.

Money, the primary focus of most business activities, is, after all, just a commodity. Leadership is a true differentiator and creator of value.

Chapter 1

A NEW WAY TO FUND THE LEADERSHIP TALENT DEFICIT

In 2004, as CEO Daniel Vasella mapped out the future of global pharmaceutical giant Novartis AG, he concluded that the company’s ability to grow and achieve ambitious performance targets rested largely on the quality of its people, particularly its leaders. He stated it simply, “Better people produce better results,” and worked closely with Juergen Brokatzky-Geiger, Novartis AG’s head of human resources, to create processes, systems, and programs that would expand the depth and quality of the leadership pool.