Most people do not start out pursuing a career in leadership. Instead, they begin work within a specialised field such as teaching, medicine or engineering. If they are good at this specialty, they may then be pressed into a management position and start slowly making their way up the ranks.

At some point, they find themselves managing people outside of their own specialized area. Their CEO may even start demanding that they adopt a broader and more strategic view of the business as a whole. As Marshall Goldsmith points out, what worked for them before is no longer what is being asked of them in their new role. In fact, research suggests that a failure to adapt to leadership beyond their past specialist sphere is a prime source of executive career derailment.

How, then, can you help them?

The answer is through four relatively inexpensive processes, which you can adopt as stand-alone strategies or integrate into a comprehensive program.

Job Rotations

Nothing builds understanding like experience. One of the most powerful ways to broaden people’s perspectives is through planned job rotations. Traditionally, job rotations have involved putting someone into a role for a year or more, but there is a growing trend of placing people into a variety of short-term roles to better round out their skills.  Of course, you need to pace your rotating placements in a way that the business can handle without adversely affecting critical aspects of performance. However, if done well, a structured job rotation program amongst senior divisional managers returns dividends that are well worth the short-term cost.

Simulations

Experience is a great teacher but sometimes we need to learn its lessons in advance. Simulations are a great way to induce insight that cannot be fully appreciated from a textbook alone. The beer game is a classic simulation that highlights how the actions of a seemingly independent unit impact upon other seemingly independent units. It is a great way to get general managers thinking outside of their divisional silos. The simulation takes less than three hours to run and debrief, and you can purchase it from the System Dynamics Society.

360-Degree Feedback

360-degree feedback is a great way to open managers’ minds to the need for change in their current approach to leadership. However, many organizations go about 360-degree feedback the wrong way. Their first mistake is to use homegrown instruments that save money and give the process a “company” feel. However, such instruments are rarely based on research into what makes senior leaders effective and they normally lack psychometric rigour in their design. I suggest using a well-designed, commercial product such as Executive Dimensions, which is specifically for senior leaders. It costs more, but in the grand scheme of things, it really is a very small investment.

The other common mistake many organizations make with 360-degree feedback is to link it to formal performance appraisal systems. To be effective, leaders need to be open to hearing the message the 360-degree feedback reveals. If the results are public and linked to any form of performance review, leaders spend all their energy defending themselves and dismissing the results, so no learning occurs. It is well worth paying an external coach to manage the process and deliver the feedback in a confidential session.

Sponsored Reading

You can help people develop the same level of expertise in business and in leadership as they already have in their specialist area. HR need to know about marketing; marketing need to understand customer service; customer service need to understand HR and they all need to understand leadership. You can stimulate this broadening of expertise by sponsoring some professional reading. Get your general managers a subscription to key periodicals such as the Harvard Business Review. Invite them to sign up to trustworthy blogs and newsletters such as Leadership Skills Australia and Smartbrief. And let them speed read the latest and greatest business books in summary format by signing them up for a subscription to Soundview.

Tagged as: senior