William J. Rothwell - Effective Succession Planning (2005)(3-e)(en)

248 CLOS ING TH E ‘‘ DEVE LO PME NTAL GAP ’’

Exhibit 10-9. (continued)

The Role of Coaching

Coaching is a means to the end of building talent. While much has been written about it,13 and it is true that coaching can be applied for many purposes to correct deficiencies in performance or to build skills, it is important to SP&M because it can be an important tool in grooming prospective successors for the future. Generally speaking, training is planned and focused, while coaching tends to be more spur-of-the-moment and driven by moment-by-moment efforts to help others perform.14 In an age where speed equals advantage, realtime grooming has appeal to many managers as a means of competency-build- ing at the speed of change.

James Hunt and Joseph Weintraub provide specific advice about how managers should coach. They should do the following:15

▲Make the effort to identify their best people. Coaching is not just a ‘‘fixit strategy’’ for poor performers; rather, it is also to be used to prepare promising people for the future.

▲Encourage their people to seek out coaching, whether planned or spontaneous.

▲Watch how they react to what their people do. In other words, good managers avoid strong emotions and criticism of their best people.

▲Make time to provide coaching and let people know that.

▲Ask questions and avoid dogmatic statements about what people should do. By asking questions, managers force employees to think things through. That has a development purpose. In time, employees will begin to think like the manager. But dogmatic orders will discourage questions and will not prompt people to think for themselves or even model how their immediate supervisor thinks.

▲Listen carefully to what people say—and how they say it. Listening also demonstrates that the manager actually cares about their people, and the importance of emotional bonding should not be minimized.

▲Model the behaviors of those who need coaching. Let employees see the manager ask for help and use it.

▲Provide useful feedback. Make sure it is timely and specific. If people do not ask for feedback on what they did, give it to them anyway if it will help their development for the future.

▲Be sure to recognize positive performance and comment on it as well as the not-so-good work that people do.

Various organizations now offer certification in coaching,16 and information about the competencies of effective coaches may be found through a simple Web search.17

The Role of Executive Coaching

Executive coaching has grown in popularity.18 Some people have even hung out their shingles as full-time executive coaches. Professional societies have been formed of executive coaches19; people can be certified as executive coaches20; and in some quarters executive coaches rank right up there with personal trainers as an executive perk. Executive coaching competencies have been identified, and they are distinct from more general coaching competencies.21

But the importance of executive coaching in succession cannot be understated.

One strategy is to go ahead and promote people who are clearly not ready for more demanding managerial (or technical) responsibility and then give those people executive coaches as a way to offer them real-time, on-the-job training. While that is not a strategy that the author of this book advocates, it is one that is being used in organizations where the leaders fell asleep on succession matters until it was too late.

There are two kinds of executive coaches. They should be clearly distinguished.

A job content coach provides guidance to individuals who are not up to snuff on the job content. An example would be to assign the organization’s retired CEO to the current CEO as a coach. The former CEO clearly understands what the job entails and can provide guidance accordingly.

A process coach is different. Akin to a process consultant, a process executive coach focuses on the image that the executive projects, the impact that he or she has on a group, and how he or she works with a group to achieve results. No knowledge of the job content is needed. But what is needed is awareness of the specialized competencies associated with process consultation, an organization development intervention invented by Edgar Schein.22

The executive coaching process should be clearly focused and implemented. It begins with establishing a contract between the coach and the coachee that sets forth the goals of the effort and describes the schedule. Nondisclosure agreements are typical, especially when the coach is made privy to sensitive, even proprietary, information during the course of the consulting engagement. The work plan for the consulting effort is clearly stated. Not all work has to be carried out face-to-face, and it is possible to arrange phone conversations, Web conversations, instant chats, and other real-time, virtually enabled approaches to the executive coaching process. Executive coaches may also administer psychological assessments to the executive, ranging from those that are available off-the-shelf to those that require a license or degree to administer.

The Role of Mentoring

A mentor is simply a teacher. Mentoring is thus the process of teaching others. In common language, a mentor is a helper who assists people in learning. The

How can mentoring play a role in succession planning and management? The relationship should be obvious. In closing developmental gaps between the competencies that individuals possess now and what they need to possess to qualify for advancement, they must seek out people, work assignments, and other experiences that will prepare them for the future and will equip them with the competencies they need. Mentors can provide advice about what people to seek, what work assignments to seek, and (perhaps most important though sometimes overlooked) mentors can provide advice on handling company politics that may help or hinder progress. To gain the most from a mentoring effort, start with a plan. That plan can be prepared by the mentee to ‘‘ask for help,’’ but should be very clear about what help is needed.

A unique problem to consider in mentoring is the so-called developmental dilemma. The development dilemma takes its name from a special problem that may come up in the mentoring process. In the years following the Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill scandal that rocked the nation, cross-gender mentoring has been complicated by concerns over appearances. The point is that older male executives who mentor younger female executives, or older female executives who mentor younger male executives, may be misperceived in those relationships. Typically a mentoring relationship requires interactions such as meetings behind closed doors, breakfast, lunch or dinner meetings, or other meetings in otherwise less than formal settings. Since tongue wagging is a popular pastime, it is common for others to talk about what they think they see. The situation is so bad in some quarters that older executives will have mentoring meetings only if they can bring a third person along as chaperone or else meet in open air areas where everything can be seen.

How can this problem be handled? Some ways that the organization can help is to:

1.Provide advice about how to deal with the problems of perceptions and how to manage them.

2.Take steps to clarify for others who may see two people meeting to clarify, casually but in advance, what the meeting is about and why it is being conducted to give those who wag their tongues less to talk about.

3.Ignore the problem all together and only deal with rumors as they spring up.

4.Provide training to mentors and mentees, covering cross-gender issues as part of the discussion.

The Role of Action Learning

Action learning is yet another way—like coaching, executive coaching, mentoring, and leadership development programs—to build competencies. Action learning, while invented in 1971 by Reg Revans,24 literally means learning

C H A P T E R 1 1

The traditional approach is to prepare successors for key positions internally. Some descriptions of succession planning and management (SP&M) treat it as nothing more than a form of replacement planning. In this process, several key assumptions are usually made: (1) key positions will be replaced whenever a vacancy occurs; (2) employees already working in the organization—and often within the function—will be the prime source of replacements; and (3) a key measure of effectiveness is the percentage of key positions that can be filled from within, with minimal delay and uproar, whenever a vacancy occurs. Some organizations add a fourth: the relative racial and sexual diversity of replacements should be enhanced so that protected labor groups are well represented among the qualified replacements for key positions prepared internally.

A systematic approach to SP&M has major advantages, of course. First, it makes succession predictable. Each time a vacancy in a key position occurs, people know precisely what to do: find a replacement. Second, since a high percentage of successors are assumed to be employed by the organization, investments in employee development can be justified to minimize losses in productivity and turnover.

However, when SP&M is treated in this way it can occasionally become a mindless exercise in ‘‘filling in the blank name on the organization chart.’’ Concern about that should be sufficient to lead strategists to explore innovative alternatives to the traditional replacement-from-within mentality. This chapter focuses on those alternatives—and on when they should be used instead of the traditional approach to SP&M.

The Need to Manage for ‘‘Getting the Work Done’’ Rather than ‘‘Managing Succession’’

‘‘The natural response to a problem,’’ writes James L. Adams in Conceptual Blockbusting, ‘‘seems to be to try to get rid of it by finding an answer—often taking the first answer that occurs and pursuing it because of one’s reluctance

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