It has become an established dogma within enterprises, especially ones structured with traditional hierarchies, that #leadership is a function one must grow into through on-the-job experience, dedication, long work hours and training. “Starting at the bottom” to work yourself to a leadership position is touted as the architected, tried and proven way to cultivate upper management. The virtue of having progressed in this way shows up in executive resumes.
Remarks one Chief Executive of a major telecommunications company:
“I can honestly say I didn’t see this in the cards nearly 35 years ago when I joined the company handling customer requests for phone service,” he said during remarks at the company’s shareholders meeting (as cited in BizJournals)
Thousands of senior leaders are each year evaluated for hierarchical progression based on how well they performed in their preceding role and function. Some will plateau at intermediate positions; others will continue to rise as they master more and more company-specific skills.
Repeat: company-specific skills. And this is where divergence begins and where companies will either flail (but not necessarily fail) or succeed.
Examples abound where internally progressed senior leadership will consistently gravitate toward their trained comfort zone of confinement and “rinse-and-repeat” approaches to addressing products, services, business development and competition.
“A chemical engineer by training, Mr. Kay R. Whitmore joined Kodak in 1957 and worked his way up through its photographic film business over the next 25 years. He was elected president in 1983 and succeeded Colby Chandler as chairman and chief executive in June 1990.” (NY Times, July 2004)
That story did not end well for #Kodak, and the story is not yet fully written for the cited telecommunications company which has recently recoiled to focus on its tried-and-tested core telecommunications competencies.
There is a mitigating approach for companies with rigid internal progression leadership development practices. It’s widely known as #Innovation.
When innovation is allowed to develop or even flourish, it establishes a parallel path toward creating a future vision for the company, very likely different than the one preordained through its past or present practices. Suddenly, some progressing leaders find an off-ramp from the company’s core competencies development path and begin to experiment with what-ifs and fast-fails and other disciplines of innovation, opening the door to a different future, one which will require a new type of leader to see emerge. Out of the pool of progressed leader candidates, emerge ones with natural abilities to lead, think, create, and take risks and, if allowed, these may become dominant in consideration for the ultimate progression.
Here allow me to digress to make a point of comparison between the two leadership faculties.
Consider two artist musicians, each shown the same musical score full of complex arpeggios and notes running at breakneck speed throughout the partitur.
A musician trained in their craft will look at the score and say to themselves: “How wonderful; with focus and practice, I can power through this and deliver an unscathed musical product to the audience.”
By contrast, the artist born with the gift of music will look at the score and, in their internal voice say: “I see the beauty hidden within these notes, I can feel the composer’s urge to express his emotion and will strive to communicate this to the audience.”
“Power through” versus to explore the beauty of possibilities is where nurture and nature make their mark, equally with musicians as with business leaders.
For companies which follow the restrictive, grow-from-the-bottom leadership development model, a few concluding observations may offer a future direction:
1. The Warning Zone
In “Bridging the Innovation Alignment Gap” I provided a model wherefrom an Innovation Archetype of a company is derived. The model uses 5 scoring categories to determine how richly imbedded is the innovation culture within the enterprise. If your innovation archetype is either a “Sideliner” or “Tinkerer,” and you grow your leadership exclusively from within, you are at risk of stagnant development, in the most extreme cases, of becoming irrelevant in your industry. The status quo needs to be re-evaluated. Continue reading …
2. Performance Analysis
In periodic performance evaluations, particularly at more senior levels, inject a process where the leader is asked to solve hypothetical challenges within the company (e.g., low staff morale with a looming staff exodus, competitive encroachment, bad social media publicity, security lapse, etc.). As the leader offers their solution (the solution itself is actually irrelevant), consider its quality: does it stretch the realm of possibilities or does it look to a previous process to solve the problem. This approach will allow you to catalog your upcoming leader candidates and begin to establish a bifurcated pool of future leaders and, when times call for a specific type of leader, have at the ready and ascend those from the respective nature or nurture category.
3. Inter-Company Employee Swaps
This is rarely practiced largely due to HR policy considerations, however, if properly implemented, it offers an extremely effective way to expose future leaders to best practices outside of the hermetically controlled single employer environment (the previously noted company-specific skills). Such programs typically involve two companies in non-competitive markets, wherein employees within a specific domain (e.g., IT Manager, Financial Leadership) are exchanged for a period of 6 months and up to a year, each assuming an equivalent role and management responsibility, including staff management, in the other company. At conclusion, each leader returns to their original post with new insights, experiences and a toolchest of approaches to freely apply in their native company. Inter-company agreements address matters of employee non-poaching, compensation, PTO and related issues. While this is a mostly unexplored practice, it offers great potential for bilateral development of future leaders. An example reference: Employee Exchange Program | Rhino Foods.
4. Cutting in Line
When suddenly a personality emerges within the ranks who, through some natural force appears to attract followers, a frequent reaction from the rank-and-file standing in their assigned positions, waiting for their next promotion opportunity is one of repulsion, distrust, and resentment. Why, after all, “cutting in line” is in conflict with established protocols and even unethical. Yet, finding optimized paths to fruition is a rare skill and a necessary one at a leadership level. Instead of repulsion, the company should create scenarios to attract and reward the behavior, provided it falls within appropriate business practices and interpersonal norms. This is nature at work.
Those who work against nature inevitably do so at their own peril.
Just as musicians born with the sensitivity and appreciation of the creative beauty in music, so too leaders, the really effective Natural ones, see the beauty in a well-crafted solution, believe in it and inspire their teams to follow their lead. In the opposite instance, Nurtured leaders, in the same scenario, might focus on the depth of the problem, its many layers of complexity and will look to power through with a solution which, while it may get you to the other side, will feel difficult, painful and will leave scars on the team.
The discourse of #Nature vs #Nurture is, of course, not unique to leadership considerations. However, in the broader observation of companies across time and space, industries, and business models a suggestion emerges, that nurtured culture and leaders operating within that culture will underperform in comparison to organizations where natural forces such as innovation and appreciation of the art of leadership are allowed to flourish.