Raj Bowen, MD, PDI Ninth House, emphasizes the urgent need for organizations to grow leadership talent from within - this will be possible only when organizations’ talent agenda will flow out of the organization’s business strategy

Why has leadership development become a top business priority?

The compelling changes in the environment are forcing organizations to look at leadership differently. The largest game-changer has been the opportunity as a result of an increasingly flat and inter-connected world where scope of achievement is limited only by the stated purpose of the enterprise. Organic growth and acquisitions jostle for legroom in the boardroom decision chains! Given the reality that ‘you can grow as much as you want’ organizations are also realizing, often brutally, that ideas as well as the energy to ‘lead’ that growth may not be the prerogative of the corner office. Different parts of the business strategy combine to make music and organizations are fast realizing the need to find those specialist musicians across the breadth and depth of the enterprise, and then string these together to produce the needed ‘business notes’. There is no wonder that the CEO’s role will change with that of the conductor.
Most successful organizations realize the need for the talent agenda to flow out of the organization’s business strategy. This ensures that processes are not vague and fuzzy. Those companies that get this right, play the same notes when they hire, evaluate, and develop talent; and proactively plan for succession. This approach makes a lot of sense when seen as the 4-wheel drive that runs the talent management framework seamlessly.
With access to capital, technology, alliances, and know-how, the only significant and sustainable competitive advantage for organizations is availability of leadership talent. If that is in place, they are part of the race. ‘Building leadership talent’ has become the CEO’s mandate in best organizations as it warrants high level of executive sponsorship along with arranging capital, building technology, striking alliances, gaining market share and building shareholder value.

How do successful organizations differentiate talent critical for future growth, to make development relevant and long lasting?

Several fundamentals seem to characterize the behaviors of an ongoing successful organizations as leaders:
• Believe and share the belief openly that every individual has unique strengths and invest in reinforcing and leveraging the same. Positioning leaders in roles that leverage their specific capabilities are often half the battle won. For example, ‘subjecting’ sales teams to even the best sales training will result in weak results if the team’s capabilities are not suitable for the role. The best organizations today are stepping beyond job descriptions and competencies to develop ‘success profiles’ for key roles and measuring how team members stack up. This exercise, simple yet powerful, throw up relevant data that can be used to anchor development tied to the business purpose of those roles and in turn connect with the mission of the enterprise.
• These organizations do not see ‘employee development’ as an isolated event. Rather they work to implant a process that our research labels as The Development Pipeline®. This process outlines essential conditions that must necessarily exist for development to ‘stick’, and comprises the following five steps:
o Insight - Do individuals have a clear and credible understanding of what they need to work on to develop their capabilities?
o Motivation - Are they sincerely excited about and committed to investing time on their development and growth?
o Skill-building - Do they have the skills required to become better at what they do or equip themselves better for larger role opportunities?
o Real world practice - Does the organization (read boss!) provide enough opportunity for them to practice new skills at the workplace and encourage learning from initial hiccups?
o Accountability - Do learners hold themselves accountable to acquire capabilities and demonstrate outcomes that must accrue?
• While the best organizations are willing to invest on building superior leadership talent, they want to take a step back and first invest in spotting the real thoroughbreds. Increasingly, we find that relying on performance management data and various types of 9-box placements can be limiting. We have seen path-breaking work in great companies which define superior leadership potential around:
o Leadership interest
o Leadership foundation
o Leadership experience
o Leadership derailer

When organizations combine this data with a robust process they increase the bench-strength of leaders who can move into larger, more complex roles or deal with significant changes in current roles effectively. Such processes planted across the talent pipeline anchor the ongoing development process in a way that helps to build leadership talent when needed, and as needed. Coaching, mentoring and related development formats become secondary to the diagnostic on what will get better returns.

What will be the DNA of leaders in the times to come?

One is tempted to say that the time has already come! We continue to study global leadership behaviors on what works, what does not work, and validate that with the results of our client engagements. There is a need for leaders to be empowered, and also be empowering. While many varying ‘gaps’ show up, prominent in appearance seem to be around:
o Not letting go of power and allowing the next line to grow
o Not creating an environment that encourages planned risk-taking and learning from mistakes
o Not seeking ‘coachable moments’ to build talent as an ongoing process
o Not encouraging teams to question status quo and failing to ‘catch people doing things right’ and applauding
o Not letting achievement credit flow downwards and find its rightful owner
The DNA of those leaders who fare better than others consistently, will invariably have some or all of these as ‘strengths’ rather than as gaps. While the above list sounds simplistic, our experience with many clients points to these being areas where time and effort invested may have the highest payout in terms of building a solid leadership culture.

How can we equip managers of today to be leaders for tomorrow?

Interestingly, many leaders we meet see this as someone else’s job and almost always as a HR function. But the ownership to build leaders rests with every leader who has the opportunity - they need to simply dig in to make that happen, and it is in their own interest and commitment to address the paranoia – ‘leaders build leaders!’ As organizations struggle due to increasing talent shortage, there is a need for them to concentrate on enabling the potential of their existing leaders- no wonder, most ‘talent’ remains ‘latent’!