Preparing Your Leadership Pipeline for 2020
Noel Tichy of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan spoke on the topic of “Preparing Your Leadership Pipeline for 2020″ during a webinar I attended offered through Linkage, a company that focuses on making people and companies great.
The topic interested me because not only do I coach leaders who are now a CEO or who are one step away from being a “C” level executive, I teach students who are the leaders in that pipeline. Twenty percent of those enrolled in my course on “A Management Approach to Organizational Behavior” want to be CEO at an organization or their own companies.
Tichy, trusted adviser to CEOs around the globe and author of numerous books on leadership and organizational development, used selections from his new book to illustrate the ways to prepare for high potential employees to move into executive positions. Co-authored with leadership expert Warren Bennis, Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls fills in what Tichy sees as the missing piece of great leadership.
He made it a point to say that judgment is “no Blink decision” — a reference to Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. Gladwell’s description of how members of the New York Fire Department make decisions in a “blink” are actually arrived at by years of development, training and skills preparation.
The factors of making a judgment within an organization include people, strategy, and crisis. There is no five-step process to how people really make a decision and Tichy stressed that there is no algorithm to make a good judgment. Instead, it is a leap of faith.
The next CEOs are already in the pipeline. To tap into the full potential of the future leaders of global or small companies, Tichy stated that the current head teacher needs to be the CEO. A CEO can create an environment of ongoing learning and teaching.
In a teaching organization, everyone is expected to contribute to the organization’s knowledge base by teaching others across departmental and regional boundaries.
For instance, Tichy suggested that the $10/hour worker in a retail shop interacting with customers can teach management what their customers really want. Around 80% of development happens on the job. A teaching organization encourages employees to learn from each other across the rungs of the corporate ladder.
There is more information in my notebook from this webinar. Please return and look for additional blogs on this topic of developing our future leaders.