Building Leaders at Every Level: A Leadership Pipeline

A crisis in leadership is the result of a company wide breakdown rather than the actions or failure of one person. Resolving such a crisis has often involved recruiting senior managers from outside the company. However, the authors argue that doing so is only a short term solution. For the long term, management must build, develop and maintain a pipeline of skilled, prepared leaders from within the company. Companies need to develop leaders who are prepared and have the necessary skill to be effective at the next level, can understand what is unique about their job, and hold their direct reports and themselves accountable for achieving the right results in the right way. This article outlines a six-passage model for understanding leadership requirements throughout the company. When people who are skilled individual contributors demonstrate an ability to handle their responsibilities and adhere to the companies values, they are often promoted to first line manager and are at passage one: Managing self to managing others. At passage two, "managing others to managing mangers," managers must divest themselves of individual tasks and only manage. Furthermore, they must see beyond their job description and consider the broad strategic issues that affect the business as a whole. At passage three, "managing managers to managing a function", mangers have to become skilled in considering other functional needs and concerns. Team play with other functional managers and competition for resources based on business needs are two major skills that must be learnt at this level. Passage four, "functional manager to business manager" requires managers to examine activities from both a short and a long term perspective. Business managers must meet quarterly profit, market share, product and people targets and, at the same time plan three- to five-year goals. Group managers at passage five must manage four skills: evaluate strategy in order to allocate and deploy capital, develop business managers, develop and implement a portfolio strategy, and assess whether they have the right core capabilities to win. Enterprise managers at passage six must set direction and develop operating mechanisms to know and drive quarter-by-quarter performance that is in tune with longer term strategy. There will be a subtle but fundamental shift in responsibility from strategic to visionary thinking, and from an operating to a global perspective. By establishing the appropriate requirements for the six leadership levels examined in this article, companies can greatly facilitate leadership development and selection processes in their organizations.