In many ways, the phone call stunned me. But I suppose I should have seen it coming – after all, it’s 2020.
I was talking to a client and she was relaying to me a profound outcome of their annual succession planning review.
Like many firms, they had a “pipeline” that identified those with potential, those who were ready with some developmental needs, and those who could assume the role immediately.
The review was scheduled for an hour on the CEO’s calendar – they had to cancel their next meeting, as well.
The team’s stunning outcome? None of those deemed ready were now truly ready.
The COVID-19 Effect
COVID19 has whip-sawed many firms’ plans this year, but one under-discussed area is its effect on organizational development. The pandemic has been the great accelerator. Going into the pandemic, there were hints that being adaptive was going to be important, but none of us foresaw what was in front of us.
Consumers and businesses moved hard to digitally-enabled commerce this year and the changes will be resilient. What was unexpected, was just how much leadership would need to be capable of shifting and making directional decisions under very high levels of uncertainty.
In short, table stakes moved a decade in a year.
What Really Happened in That Meeting?
Succession planning, done well, is the process of embedding developmental opportunities matched to the future needs of the organization. Maturing opportunities are direct experience in a role, classroom experience, and mentoring.
What many don’t consider, is that it rises and falls on the quality of the imagination and strategic vision of the senior leadership team. The nuance is that these expectations are set at a point in time with their best intuitive forecast – and no one saw this change coming.
What my client had just experienced was a jarring reset of those expectations – and it’s going to ripple through firms as they do their talent assessments.
Two really big shifts happened right before our eyes in 2020:
- The first was a need for every people leader in the firm to be able to form a directionally correct agenda in the face of uncertainty and imperfect information.
- The second was to be able to interact with their peers and negotiate barriers – inside and outside the enterprise.
Turning the Ship is Hard
This kind of talent development is one of the more long-range decisions and investments senior management teams make – some argue it’s the most important work they do as a group. Getting a wake-up call, as my client did above, is akin to launching an important and costly product that missed the market window.
Talent development done well is a game-changer for growing enterprises. It ensures that the best aspects of culture are experientially coached into the firm. Every time you make a choice to elevate a leader, you are making an investment that either will raise or lower the center of gravity of the group.
Firms need to always be working a short and long game when it comes to talent. The firms that are strong in this dimension have meetings where both aspects are ruthlessly and constructively reviewed annually. Who could step in right now, and who is on the trajectory to be ready?
Putting future leaders in fresh contexts is best done earlier rather than later so that their blind spots can be mitigated and any gaps in training can be filled in when the future of the business is not on the line.
My Coaching
When these disconnects happen, there is an immediate feeling that we’ve somehow made a mistake – and sometimes we have contributed by allowing leadership behavior to take us in the wrong direction. We may have avoided having hard discussions. We may have promoted people ahead of their developmental curve. We may be harder on internal candidates because we know their strengths and weaknesses so intimately.
The truth is that the recovery path does not depend specifically on how you got there, but how quickly you can accelerate out of it.
Here are 5 tips to get you started:
- Clarity. A murky plan leads to mixed developmental outcomes. You need to do the planning work to be sure that everyone is really on the same page. Do the work to prioritize and clarify your strategic “critical few” and implementation plans. Tip: Are you involved in a series of dialogues where there is disagreement on talent (a good thing) that doesn’t converge (not a good thing)? It may not be the talent discussion, but rather the traceability of the strategic plan to the talent dialogue.
- Meritocracy. Emphasize and demonstrate that insight, innovation, and thought leadership can come from anywhere in the firm and at any level. Examine how you run important meetings. Tip: In your facilitation, is everyone, regardless of seniority, invited into the pre-decision dialogue? Are skip-level meetings regular and truly open?
- Capacity. Be confident that your team has more performance capacity than you are giving them credit for. I’ve worked with dozens of leaders on these opportunities, and without fail, they are amazed at how people “come alive” when we remove the uncertainty that holds back potentially high-performance team members. Tip: Who is most ready for a new role? Give them a bump in responsibility in the next 60 days. If it goes well, do it again.
- Ownership. Take a hard look in the mirror. Every member of the senior team has a responsibility to develop their successor. Remember, you are not developing clones – you are developing someone who can discover and implement the future. Tip: In most firms, talent is discovered several layers removed from the “staff” of the senior leader’s team. Senior leaders need to be able to have rich dialogues on topics three layers deep in the firm, then cross-connect their insights during the talent review process.
- Opportunity. Emphasize cross-functional development early in your leadership team. Tip: How many team members have had a chance to form and lead a cross-functional effort? This one act, done intentionally, can build bench strength faster since it provides real-world “labs” to work out leadership strength in the real world across people, processes, and technology.
Pulling it All Together
It’s time to put the assembly line model of leadership development in the rearview mirror. Instead, we need to provide up-and-coming leaders with a mix of educational and experiential learning that leads them not toward conformity, but extraordinary skills in adaptation.
In my work with firms and organizations, we take a both/and approach where we lock onto their upcoming strategic shifts and the corresponding needs. We use this to build cross-functional teams that create the necessary experiences to allow these skills to develop. We specifically do work on lateral leadership and cross-functionality that leads to much better decision making and results. Then we wrap it into a measurable plan that keeps them on track for now and the future.
If you’d like to know more about how that might work in your context, please drop me a note at scott@scottpropp.com or set up an appointment using this link.
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