In a recent blog, I advocated for organizations’ developing a leadership pipeline in order to have the leaders they will need in the future. That blog item made the case for going beyond typical leadership training and development to understanding and building the competencies and skills leaders will need to have five or more years from now — and those skills might be very different from the ones required today. Researchers and polls show that one of the many shortcomings in leadership in many companies is an inability to lead. As we build our leadership pipelines for the future organizations, we need to select or develop people who can lead. I know, this sounds blindingly obvious, but apparently this common sense may not be as common as you’d think.
A recent Forbes article states that a “2016 Gallup poll found that only 18% of managers demonstrate a high level of talent for managing others – meaning a shocking 82% of managers aren’t very good at leading people.”
I am sure that many readers were not even slightly surprised by this information. So how do our leaders and managers get promoted to their leadership positions? According to the Forbes article, “managers are promoted into their roles based on tenure or previous manager roles – with little account for whether they possess the humanistic skills and qualities for good leadership.”
An important step in building a leadership pipeline for the future is to analyze your current practices related to rewards and promotion. How is your organization developing leaders? How do leaders move up the organization? What does your organization reward and recognize? How are bonuses and promotions earned? By getting results? Or by leading direct reports and teams in getting results? Are leaders promoted for firefighting and coming to the rescue when bad things happen, or by preventing problems from happening in the first place — by putting processes and systems in place in the pursuit of excellence?
What kinds of behaviors is your company rewarding? Are leaders developed and promoted by climbing the organization through competition and political astuteness or by leading effectively? Are they promoted because of their high productivity, or for developing high productivity throughout their teams? Competitiveness, political astuteness, individual productivity: these are obviously not bad traits, but are these the primary leadership traits you need to bring your organization and your people to high performance, productivity, and excellence?
Are your leaders being promoted through their technical expertise? Again, technical expertise is not a bad thing, but leaders in the pipeline must learn to lead.
I ask these questions because how people are rewarded and recognized is extremely powerful. Your organization may have a leadership development program that may be a quality program. But regardless of training, people do what they are held accountable for doing. If they are being asked to lead in a certain way in their training but are rewarded and recognized for a different set of behaviors, the ones they are rewarded for will win out. An organization should develop its “strategic plan for leadership” – the leadership pipeline plan, then feedback, accountability, rewards, recognition training and development systems for people in the organization need to be aligned to that plan.
Understanding your current leadership development and promotion practices can help tremendously in strategic leadership pipeline planning and then aligning around that future need.
If you’d like a discussion about assessing or improving your leadership pipeline, we can help. Contact us at [email protected] or call 207-739-9540.
To connect with Verna Lynch in LinkedIn please see https:www.linkedin.com/in/transformingorganizations/ .
Leave a Reply