Cultivating future leaders

What separates winning or­ganisations from the also-runs? Noel Tichy has spent 25 years studying both winners and losers from the inside out for an an­swer. Not surprising, he found that winning organisations share certain financial attributes. Several companies have been setting new records for financial performance, enriching shareholders, building communities, and providing greater opportunities for employees. Men and women who personally and methodically nurture the develop­ment of other leaders at all levels of the organisation lead these companies.

Even if you, as a leader, are smart enough to anticipate and prepare for massive economic and social shifts, you cannot respond to the ground-level demands of the moment without the energy, commitment, and ability of people throughout the organisation. Effective leaders recognise that the ultimate test of leadership is sustained success, which demands the constant cultivation of future leaders. This has important implica­tions for the work you do every day. For one thing, all the money your organisation invests in “leadership development” means little without an equal investment of your own time and effort. Yet the benefits of investing your time will accrue to you as well as to your organisation. If long-term success requires more leaders at more levels than your competitors, then teaching, coach­ing, and cultivating others becomes a strategic imperative for senior executives.

Three keys for learning

The ability to develop leaders of others, according to Tichy, requires three things: a teachable point of view, a story for your organisation, and a well-defined methodology for teaching and coaching.

Teachable Point of View: To succeed as a leader, you must be able to articulate a defining position for your organisation. You must be able to talk clearly and convincingly about who you are, why you exist, and how you operate. This means you need to have ideas on prod­ucts, services, distribution channels, customers, and growth. These ideas need to be supported by a value system that the leader articulates, exemplifies, and enforces.

But you also need something Tichy calls E-CUBED: emotional energy and edge. “Winning leaders seem to naturally generate positive emotional energy in others. They also have the edge to face reality and make tough yes-or-no decisions.” That is your unique burden – not to call in consultants or convene a task force, but at crucial moments, when forced to act quickly, to make the difficult choices only you can make. It often makes you the most un­popular person in the organisation, which is why those who need to be liked are seldom effective leaders – at least not during the times of crisis. But leadership is the ability to see things as they really are and to mobilise an appropriate response. You can only make those decisions and engender that response if you have clear ideas and values. All three components of leadership – good ideas, appropriate values, positive energy and edge – are part of the package you present to those you hope to develop.

Living stories

The basic cognitive form in which people organise their thinking is the narrative story. Individuals, families, organisations, communities, and nations all have tales that help them make sense of themselves and the world. There are three kinds of stories that leaders can tell. There is the ‘who I am’ story in which leaders describe themselves. There is the ‘who are we’ story, in which you articulate for your constituents what their identity is. But the most im­portant leadership tale is the ‘where we are going’ story. Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech mobilised energy around powerful images of social equality – black and white children holding hands in a transformed world. Winning busi­ness leaders use the power of story­telling as effectively as most gifted public leaders. Dramatic storytelling is the way people learn from, and connect with, one another.

Teaching Methodology

To be a great leader you have to be a great learner. Most effective teachers – and leaders – will tell you that they grow as much as those they teach and lead. The process of teaching can be quite simple; it starts with having a conscious system for interacting with people. You must be methodical but not mechanical in your approach to teaching. To make a difference, you must have the self-confidence to be vulnerable to others; you need to share your mistakes and doubts as well as your accomplishments.

Learning to teach

Articulating your ideas and values, developing a teachable point of view, and developing stories that bring your views to life are all learn­able skills. The current conventional wisdom in leadership development programmes is to develop a set of competencies for what good leader is and then figure out a way to develop people around those competencies. At the end of the day the competencies that get developed in these programmes look similar – having integrity, building trust, demonstrating competence, know­ing how to overcome resistance etc. What is missing is the leaders themselves teaching colleagues, not leaving the teaching to others or talking about somebody else’s values. People want their leader to look them in the eyes and say, “Here is where our company is going and here is what we need from leaders in order to get there.”

Practice what you teach

The military has understood this for years. Soldiers will follow a gen­eral even to the peril of their lives because such leaders have credibility. The credibility comes from living their personal ideas and values and bringing to life the story of where the group was heading. Religious in­stitutions have been clear on this ap­proach to pastoral training. Medical educators know that you cannot put a professor in the operating room to demonstrate surgical technique. You need someone who has hands-on expertise, credibility, and a teachable point of view about how to develop other’s capabilities.

Making training pay

Most leadership training springs from the question, “Are leaders born or made?” – and is designed to prove that the latter is the cor­rect answer. It is an age-old, and essentially pointless, debate. It is like asking whether athletes are made or born. The answer is obviously, both. With coaching, commitment, hard work, perhaps any group of people could improve their ability to play tennis, golf, or football. There are not many, however, who are going to be Serena Williams, Tiger Woods, or Cristiano Ronaldo. The same with leadership. Any organisa­tion that takes the time to get more leadership out of people is going to be far ahead of its competitors. Are all managers candidates for the top job? Of course not. But they can be a lot better than they are now. We can all sharpen our ideas and better articulate our values and improve our capacity for making yes-no decisions. So it is worth the effort to develop everybody.

Losing organisations make the mistake of handicapping their field of potential leaders and investing their training and development re­sources only in those they think will go the furthest. Inevitably, they pass over a lot of talent. Winning organ­isations look at broad leadership skills, not just success with particular projects. Most importantly, they continue to invest in the develop­ment of everyone else, including those they do not expect to rise to the top. Winning companies’ more inclusive approach helps get the best out of everyone.

Leaders who invest them­selves personally in the process of developing future leaders are also building the most precious of organisational assets. The long-term success of leaders cannot be measured by whether they win today or tomorrow. The measure of their success will be whether or not their company is still winning a decade from now, when a new generation of leaders has taken over.

BY CAPT SAM ADDAIH (RTD)