Chapter 16: How Companies Can Use Passages to Develop Leadership

Up to now, we’ve focused on ways individuals can navigate these predictable, intense passages to become more effective leaders. Although we’ve noted ways organizations can facilitate these passages (and how they sometimes fail to do so), we recognize that many companies are eager to use this material on a broader scale. Most companies today use succession-planning systems and talent reviews to develop leaders. Since the early work of Lombardo and McCall, we have also known about the importance of experiences in leadership development, even though most of the work done in this area has focused on positive, definable, even measurable, career experiences and events.

In this book, we have looked at experiences in a broader sense. Now we’d like to offer some ways you can implement a leadership passage strategy on a larger scale. Let’s take a one-chapter break from the focus on the individual and see how the organization itself can participate more effectively in the leadership development process.

Traditional Leadership Development

Companies are aware of leadership transitions. Most corporate leaders today know about Daniel Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence and his premise that intelligence alone is insufficient for success in interdependent teams and organizations. Goleman also points out that self-awareness, self-regulation, and the understanding of how to self-motivate are key components of emotional intelligence. Today many companies offer coaching to leaders to improve their interpersonal skills and relationships, especially those who may be technically competent but less effective communicating with and motivating peers and direct reports.

What companies generally don’t do, however, is integrate Goleman’s insights about emotional intelligence, including the factors around self-awareness and self-regulation, into the core “people processes” of selection, assessment, promotion, and development. When a leader is identified as technically competent but in need of behavioral change, she is often assigned a coach who is asked to work confidentially with the executive; the underlying issues are deemed too complicated, messy, or private to be part of the business conversation.

We have observed that in many companies today, leadership development tends to be managed in a fairly narrow way. Attributes of leadership are identified, usually based on performance competencies of current high-visibility leaders. Leadership development aimed at this target is then undertaken in a classroom-oriented, skill-based, strictly cognitive environment.

The critical leadership passages described in this book—transitions faced by every successful executive—tend to be seen as peripheral to core people processes rather than integral to them. Most organizations are concerned with how they can prepare someone for the next job. The key focus is, “What does this person already know and what do we need to teach him?” rather than, “What does this particular individual need to understand?” When experience and competency dominate who is hired, promoted, and developed, individuals who become leaders are often strong performers but not always strong leaders.

For example, you may be very good at sales, manufacturing, or finance, or have succeeded at a series of positions, but still lack the empathy, wisdom, and maturity required of leaders. In some cases, you can embody a company’s model of leadership competency to the letter and still not be a leader anyone would want to follow.

In many fast-moving, successful companies, strong, successful leaders who fail at some challenge present a real dilemma to the organization. Although, as we have seen, failure is a powerful teacher, it can also throw sand into the gears of succession planning. The paradox is that even though Bob’s failure may make Bob a stronger leader, it may also make Bob seem weaker in the eyes of everyone else. Rarely is this issue addressed during succession planning. We don’t hear the question: “But what did he really learn from that experience of failing at X?” or “How will she now be more effective because of her failure?” Even more important, since life itself is a leadership development experience, rarely are the life events that shape leaders—divorce, death, living cross-culturally, personal transformation—allowed to enter the politically correct discussions that constitute leadership reviews. Companies act instead as if the personal life of a leader doesn’t exist.

As coaches, however, we know it does. In fact, one of the unique privileges of being an executive coach is that we are privy to our clients’ struggles with everything from bad bosses to balancing family and work. From our conversations with them, it is clear that a lot is going on inside that directly affects how they perform and develop as leaders. Inside companies, however, most leaders maintain a strict separation of the professional and the personal. To their bosses, peers, and direct reports, they seem fine. Beneath the surface, though, they are going through predictable, intense passages, and their company is often unwilling or unable even to acknowledge their journey, much less support them on it. We’ve concluded that companies are missing a tremendous opportunity to help individuals take responsibility for their own leadership development.