What we miss in Leadership Development - Redundancy!

Yes, you read it right. I am saying that there needs to be a certain element of employee redundancy for a function / organization to prosper. Why am I saying this?

Because unless you are willing to move your high potential employees to explore other areas of work in the organization, they will never develop to become ‘General’ managers. We will continue to promote (read re-designate because the role will never change except volume) employees basis current performance and not think of developing rounded skills which are vital at leadership levels in any organization. Learning out of your comfort zone will never happen if there is no one to take the place of the high-performer.

Job Rotation as a concept has been much talked and written about. However, one tends to miss out on certain basic pre-requisites before thinking of this:

• Top management will – This is a no-brainer. Unless the top team is willing to make a few sacrifices at a tactical level to make sure that we have ready leaders in future, no job rotation program will ever work. Long-term vision has to precede shorter-term decisions.

• Sustainability – Typically, our top performers become indispensable. However, sustainability over a period of time cannot be person dependent. That’s why the redundancy is much needed to keep things flowing smoothly.

• Mortality – Who is responsible for the mortality of the organization? In owner driven firms, this one is easy. But for so-called ‘professional’ organizations, one needs to constantly be on the lookout and create new leaders. Not easy.

Assuming all this in place, how does one go about operationalizing the job rotation programs:

Identify your high potentials (HiPos) – Mind you, not the high performers. Keep a ratio of least 3 aspirants for a critical position. I won’t get into the tools required to do this. There is a plethora of them available in the HR market.

Ask them – Telling them that they are in the HiPo list will cut down the possibility of losing them by more than half. You don’t want your investments in getting them ready going down the drain just because they didn’t know. Ask them if they are interested at all. Some of them might be happy with the functional growth. Shifting them elsewhere will only demotivate them.

Manage collateral damage – At this point, you might end up losing some high performing employees since they would have wanted their names in the list. Anticipate this and be ready before it happens.

Mentor the HiPos - Leadership readiness is not a 100m sprint. Think of it like a marathon. Have a 5 year plan and give enough time in each of the functions. No function is more or less important for an organization in the long term. Assign long term mentors to them who have no direct interest in their growth / failure. Mentoring services can also be got from industry / HR experts outside the organization. The HiPos will need only guidance on a fortnightly / monthly basis.

The schedule is sacrosanct – Have a rotational program for at least 18 months in one project / role. Do not give in to the lure of extending the time limit for the project / role even if it’s working very well. Remember the long term vision at this time.

And keep remembering again and again, the leadership development program as a whole is for the greater organizational good. While some maybe born with the requisite skills, others can be made into leaders. And it’s our job to do that.

Engage your critical employees..

I came across this very interesting article in McKinsey Quarterly focusing on engaging critical employees in the organization. It speaks about mapping the probability of an employee leaving the organization vs. the difficulty in replacing him/her. Essentially, it talks of a matrix that looks somewhat like this:

So what this is saying is that an employee falling in the red zone has a higher probability of leaving the organization (based on factors such as market demand, salary trends, family situation etc.) and it will also be very difficult to replace him / her.

We tried to implement this in our organization but came across some roadblocks. We found that somehow the criticality of the role that was being played by our employee was getting missed out. We wanted to get in the job role aspect rather than only focusing on the person. This was because we were not sure of skills being the only differentiating factor. We tweaked the matrix as follows:

This gave us an idea of how important the person was to us with regard to the work that he was performing and his/her Replaceability. The definitions for the boxes in the matrix were tweaked to build in the probability of the person leaving and the difficulty in replacing him/her.

This is a great tool to help your line managers engage in discussions and help them understand each of their subordinates in a deeper manner. This gives great insights into identifying the motivational anchors of the team and these can then be clubbed together to identify themes on engagement. In this particular case, this matrix was used for succession planning in the organization to identify and keep a ready pipeline for the ‘red box’ positions / persons.