avid Dotlich is the President of the Mercer Delta Executive Learning Center, a global provider of senior executive programs, which has offices, faculty and Global 500 clients throughout the world. He also consults to executive committees, CEOs and senior leaders in the areas of leadership, business strategy and executive coaching.
David is a certified psychologist in career development, life planning and numerous psychological inventories, and co-author of six books including his newest Head, Heart and Guts - How the World´s Best Companies Develop Complete Leaders, Why CEOs Fail - The 11 Behaviors That Can Derail Your Climb To The Top and How to Manage Them and Leadership Passages - The Personal and Professional Transitions that Make or Break a Leader. Dr. Dotlich was a founding partner of CDR International, which was acquired by Mercer Delta Consulting in 2004. He was a professor at the University of Minnesota faculty, teaching in the business school and speech communication department. He has frequently taught in the executive development programs at several universities, has served on the ASPD National Issues Committee and the board of directors of Schmitt Industries. He lives with his family in the Pacific Northwest.
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KE: Our topic today is How the World´s Best Companies Develop Complete Leaders, which is the subtitle of the new book you´ve just co-authored. David, what is "a complete leader"?
DD: What does make an effective leader and how does a complete leader differ from a partial leader? We say that a complete leader is a very simple composition of head - providing direction and strategy, guts - doing the right thing based on clear values and taking personal and organizational risks, and heart - the capacity to understand, to work with, build effective relationships and develop other people. Now that seems very simple and yet it's very complex. It´s the ability to be multidimensional and draw from all three. So, that´s how we define a complete leader.
KE: What was the impetus for you and your co-authors to write this book?
DD: Together, we have had almost 100 years of experience and I hate to admit that, but it´s true. So, this book is written based on our experience in coaching and teaching - all of us were professors or consultants or coaches and/or senior HR professionals for a number of years. During my career, I was head of HR at Honeywell, for instance. We have taught thousands of leaders through Mercer Delta Executive Learning programs and we noticed that some of the same themes appeared over and over. These themes are both very complex and very simple.
We live in an era of unpredictability, where there is declining trust in institutions and leaders. It is an era of increasing complexity. And then we also noticed, both in our research and in reading and talking to leaders across industries and around the world, that there is just much more volatility and ambiguity in business and in competition in business today, that the future seems much more unpredictable. A strategic plan that used to be three years is now six months.
It's difficult to know what´s going to be happening around the corner. All of these things were the catalyst for writing about what makes an effective leader in this type of environment. Then, we did our own research where we interviewed about 200 senior leaders around the world.
They identified clear challenges across industries. The pressure to stay competitive remains high. Market conditions are changing constantly. Leaders need to be agile and thoughtful about what´s happening in the world. They identified that the need for innovation, (which we are predicting is going to become a national issue in the next few years), is much more important for organizations today. Then finally, the power of the customer - due to the Internet, digitalization and a whole number of forces - the customer is now in charge and leaders have to be much more responsive to what the customer is asking for.
Then, on top of this, what they told us was that leadership shortages are true across companies and industries. In fact more than 75% said that in their own leadership pipeline there were significant weaknesses. Either there weren´t enough leaders that were ready now or the development efforts being taken by their organization were not sufficient in order to produce leaders for the future. So, these were some of the catalysts that we found in our research.
KE: In your book you talk about the differences between complete and partial leaders. What happens when leaders operate as partial leaders?
DD:What we found is that many companies and organizations emphasize leadership capacity focusing either on the head, heart, or guts and that partial leaders are those who really excel in one of the three dimensions and are often seen as effective in the short term. It´s not unusual for companies to promote people who are very smart, very analytical, very logical and strategic. Sometimes they are the smartest people around, but in the longer term what happens, and this relates to our work on derailment, is that they might not understand the impact of their actions or they might undervalue the people side of the business. Or, they might not focus on developing leaders in their business.
I was coaching a CEO just recently who was brilliant and really good at strategic thinking and planning but had a huge underdeveloped capacity around growing people and the whole area of leadership development. It was a huge risk, not only for him, but for his firm as well. And this is a most common issue that we see around partial leadership in large and small companies today, the over focus on head.
We also see that there are some people who really are good at inspiring, and motivating, connecting with people through loyalty and commitment. We call these heart leaders and they really are good in the short term at inspiring people to perform, but sometimes over the long term can´t make the tough choices that are needed for success or they can't give tough feedback or make hard decisions around letting people go.
And then finally we have seen some very intuitive and instinctive guts leaders we call them, who can make bold moves, who can act with little data. They may really attract attention in the short term, take big risks, but in the long term they may get caught up in the drama of their bold moves. They might read their own press, they might have trouble staying the course, they might have trouble getting people to buy-in. All these things constitute risks over the longer term. So, what we found is that in each of these areas, leadership strengths become leadership weaknesses in the long term, and I don´t think that´s going to be a surprise to anybody.
KE: Many in the leveraging strengths movement, including such people as Marcus Buckingham, encourage people to give up the notion of becoming well rounded and instead to leverage what they do really well. The argument is that it´s not realistic to be really good at everything. What´s your perspective on that?
DD: We each have the capacities for head, heart and guts. They are what we use as humans in connecting with others and leading and making choices. It´s more a matter of what we choose to focus on in different situations. What we are suggesting is that it isn´t a case of not having these strengths, it´s about choosing to use them more.
KE: You were talking a little bit earlier about the importance of innovation, now and in the future. What is required to be successful with innovation?
DD:Well we believe, and this has come up a lot in working with CEOs, that we are in an environment that has really focused on measurement and control. Sarbanes-Oxley has asked people at all levels of an organization to sign a statement saying that they can certify the results. It´s been almost an environment in which we have at least de-emphasized risk taking, innovation, breakthrough thinking in support of following the rules. We see the focus changing toward creating climates where breakthrough ideas can happen, where good ideas can be executed on.
A leader creates that sort of environment through combining head, heart and guts. That is where you get people to collaborate, where you create an environment where risk taking happens. A leader has to accept chaos as an important part of innovation and endure it in order to get good ideas to surface and to be able to understand when brainstorming, decision-making, opening options and narrowing options have to occur. So, all of these things constitute innovation, but the point we make in the book is that innovation is a combination of head, heart and guts.
It isn´t just the breakthrough guts idea; it´s all three things, including heart. We often don´t think of heart as a big part of innovation, but it is connecting people together and then creating an environment where people feel safe enough to raise off the wall ideas. We are of the position that innovation is going to become much more of a valued leadership capability in the future and we put this into many of the programs that we teach today.
KE: As we look at leadership competency models and many of the leadership development programs that are out there, they tend to emphasize one particular area over others. Are we inadvertently developing partial leaders by putting them through these sorts of experiences that just focus in on this single dimension of head, heart, or guts?
DD: Many companies ask us to come in and look at their leadership programs, particularly for the top of the house. What we find is that quite often, executive development programs reflect the climate and the culture and the current approach to leadership of the organization. When companies want to bring in new ideas, they often hire outsiders to come in. Action learning, which I wrote about many years ago, is a whole effort to combine development with challenging the assumptions of the business. It´s one of the things that we believe executive development can do for an organization - bring in new information and ideas.
KE: Sometimes organizations think they need a different perspective, and they bring in executives with that different approach. They are then often rejected by the organization. It´s almost as if the organization has the little antibodies that reject the new ideas, even though they said that´s what they needed in the first place.
DD: Well it´s ironic, and it happens more often than you might realize. The conscious part of the organization wants change, the unconscious part of an organization often doesn´t. The conscious part hires the new leader and then the unconscious acts out. How come he or she doesn´t fit in? Why don´t they understand our business? Why do they try to change everything? Systematically, they begin to reject the new leader. There has been a lot of great research advising people on how to time the change that you make. Certainly we coach the boss of the new hire to be able to understand why they hired that person in the first place. But I think there is a lot of money wasted on recruitment and hiring and change efforts by bringing people in at the top without really working some of the systemic issues around that hire.
KE: To summarize your points so far - complete leadership is a combination of head, heart and guts, capacities that we all have as human beings. All three elements are required to deal with the complexities of leadership. That´s probably always been true, but do you feel like it's becoming increasingly important?
DD: I do and I think that it´s not a new idea. It´s a blend of ideas that are around in many places. We´ve all heard about the importance of emotional intelligence, risk taking, and strategic thinking. It´s about becoming a leader that people trust, someone they want to follow and someone who is successful in an environment where the rules are either unclear or changing constantly. It's someone who is smart, who really understands others and can connect with them, but is also willing to take both personal and organizational risks.
Somebody said to me the other day, "I am a leader and I take risks all the time. In fact I have a lot of guts, I bet the company on our strategy." And I said, "I know that´s true. What I´m wondering is can you tell your assistant how you feel about her performance?" He asked what that had to do with anything. And I said, "Lots of times risk taking is as simple as being willing to disclose what you think and feel." Often in organizations, particularly at the top, we find people willing to bet the company and take organizational risks, but unwilling to be vulnerable or to disclose personal feelings. They may be unwilling to simply say, "I don´t know", which constitutes a huge risk for leaders who feel that they have to know it all to be in charge. So, risk taking and guts doesn´t just simply mean financial risk or strategic risk, it also means personal risk.
KE: You say in your book that, "... employees today feel more vulnerable than ever before, which is why they expect leaders to be more than brilliant strategists. They look to their leaders to help protect them, to inform them and have the strength of character to do the right thing." That´s a lot of responsibility. I am wondering how you think these types of employee expectations impact the desire of younger workers to move into leadership roles.
DD:Leaders can make the mistake of trying to meet all the expectations of all the people who work for them. Many people in organizations look to the top and expect senior leadership to take care of them, solve their problems, have all the answers, heal the sick, raise the dead, I mean the list goes on an on. In our coaching of leaders we find this is a trap that they can fall into. It´s important to be realistic about what you can do and can´t do. It´s important to not buy into the unrealistic expectations. At the same time, it is important to understand the reasonable expectations people hold of their leaders which is to be honest, straightforward, keep them informed, share information, and certainly to have the strength of character to do the right thing. There are many disclosures, not only around executive compensation but also around decision making that often are not shared. All of these things can create an environment of organizational distress. It´s important for leaders to understand that people do feel vulnerable working in large systems today, and that sense of vulnerability is an important part of what leaders must deal with.
KE:I know in my conversations with Meg Wheatley, when we talked about organizations as systems, she really felt that we have done a disservice to leaders by implying that they do need to be all knowing. She talked about the importance of the role of leader as facilitator of the collective intelligence - being able to gather people together, to ask questions and have the conversation, to generate the learning from the group. What are your thoughts on this?
DD: I agree with Meg entirely. I think senior leaders in large companies often buy into the myth of needing to know it all. Sometimes they help foster it; sometimes it´s convenient to continue the hierarchy. Recently I was working with one of the largest companies in the world with their top group and these were people running billions of dollars of organizations and units and people working for them. You would be surprised at how people look up to expect their problems to be solved by someone above them.
Now, where does that come from? Some of that behavior constitutes how you move up in organizations - by satisfying the boss. Sometimes it comes from the way the organization is run, people that challenge the boss are sometimes punished. It´s an organizational tradition, or the way business gets done. This not only stifles innovation, it also stifles adaptability to the changing environment, where the hierarchy is seen as having more information at the higher levels than at the lower levels.
KE: And it creates that feeling of powerlessness at the lower level.
DD: It does and I think it also, to your point Karen, creates some cynicism among people at lower levels and newer people or younger people coming in. It can impact people´s desire to move into leadership roles. And sometimes that belief is held for some very good reasons.
KE: Let´s look now at some examples of whole leaders.
DD: Rudy Giuliani is an example of a leader who was really humanized through 9/11. What we saw through that experience was his heart, his capacity to empathize. Here is a leader who primarily relied on his head and certainly his guts. In the 9/11 aftermath, we saw his heart and his compassion and we trusted him as a result of that. Andrea Jung is somebody we know well. I worked with her at Avon. A leader with great strategic brilliance, she has turned around Avon, taken huge risks. She is also known for her capacity to connect and work with people. When you listen to her, she is an inspiring speaker, because she really understands people and she conveys that. I think Jeff Immelt is another leader who has had the guts to change his organization, GE, significantly, by redirecting it after the Welch era. He is strategically brilliant and also known as a people person. Bill Weldon at J&J is also someone we would consider to be a whole leader. Bill has not only strategically increased J&J´s share price and market value, he is also known as a leader of the people, connects well at all levels of the organization, listens closely to what people are telling him, is humble in his approach and yet has had the guts, he and his team, to buy Pfizer's consumer business, taking some big strategic bets. He is also the kind of leader who tells the truth and makes tough people choices, no matter how painful it is. So, these are just some of the examples of whole leaders. We think there are many, many more.
KE: How does a leader develop the understanding about when to skillfully apply head, heart or guts to the situation at hand?
DD: It isn´t so much conscious, saying, "Okay, now I am going to use my head and now I am going to use my heart." Some of it comes through experience, some of it comes through failure, some of it comes through just recognizing your humanity, also recognizing that you live in a system that might emphasize one more than the others, but you can be a whole leader. It is that capacity to move between them and to blend all three that we think is important.
KE: Mercer-Delta conducted a study on context versus content, which I found very interesting. What were the study's findings and how do they relate to this need for complete leaders?
DD: Well this is a very complex study around leadership success and failure that I will simplify quickly. There are certain situations where choosing the right answer or the best answer, for instance, in the area of needing to implement or choose a new strategy or direction, means that an organization needs to have really smart people. We call this a content orientation, which would be almost a head orientation.
Then there are other places where it isn´t so much the great idea that´s critical, instead what´s critical is the context - it´s getting people to work together, having the right process for people to work together, bringing people along to gain buy-in. Focusing on the context is more of a heart orientation, and sometimes that is what is most needed. Some leaders are content oriented, some people are much more contextual and we found that a contextual leader placed in a content situation can be hugely ineffective. Put in a different environment with a different orientation, this same person can be successful. So, really it comes down to what does the business require and what does the situation demand and then can the leader switch between these two?
In terms of these key findings, we found that early career CEO failures are often related to CEOs who are particularly weak on context. In other words, new CEOs come in and have a lot of great ideas and often they have thought about what they want to do as CEO, but they really don´t understand how to get people to work together, where the organizational leverage resides, how to create collaboration. Often this happens when they follow CEOs who have been strong context leaders, who have been really good at mobilizing the organization. The new CEO comes in with great ideas but can´t implement them because he/she doesn´t grasp the context. Sometimes this emerges as the inability to execute great strategies because they go beyond what the organization is able to do at that time. Sometimes people aren't aligned, there is fighting between the silos, and this results in declining credibility of the leader. It isn´t that the leader is bad, it's that he or she is focusing on content when what is really needed is a focus on context. In other words, there is too much emphasis on the head - not enough on the heart and the guts.
KE: You talk in your book about the fact that whole leaders respond situationally. The leadership program by Ken Blanchard called Situational Leadership has been around a long time. What´s new or different about the ideas that you are proposing in this book?
DD: Well I think it's a refinement of Ken´s ideas. Situational leadership is a great concept. I think it's intuitively true for almost any leader today. You can´t use the same tool no matter what the situation and I think situational leadership does a very good job of describing the fact that different leadership abilities and styles are needed given different business challenges or situations. In a study on CEO performance, the idea of context and content is really a refinement of that basic idea of situational leadership, but it's focused on all of the things that occur at the top of an organization. The research that we have done makes the same point of situational leadership, but probably in a much more comprehensive way when applied to CEOs.
KE: You have extensive experience in executive development, David. Let´s move our discussion to ways in which HR can help develop whole or complete leaders, starting with building the right mindset.
DD: Quite often, we are asked to come in and work with organizations that really want to fix people. They might say, "Our leaders don´t have enough heart, let´s have a training program." Or, "We need to be much more growth focused; can you teach us about growth?" I think what we have learned over time is that you can really waste your time and your resources in trying to fix people through training, or leadership development. That might sound unusual coming from someone who runs a large executive development company, but the systemic issues are often as important to address as the skill and learning and education issues.
And, the systemic issues are often denied through training. It's the unwillingness to address the fact that hierarchy prevents innovation, as an example, or the unwillingness to address the fact that dialogue and problem solving cannot occur. So what we talk about in the book is that organizations tend to focus on one set of leadership capabilities, head, and yet the systemic issues often prevent people from acting with heart or taking risks. Often, those issues need to be addressed first, or as part of implementing a development process.
That might include involving the executive committee, engaging the CEO, getting senior leaders involved in the process, using leadership development not necessarily to fix people but as a diagnostic tool, customizing the training to the organizational systemic issues. In all of these things, we think our mindset, in HR in particular, needs to take the lead and have the courage to say this is a systemic issue, this is a context issue, it isn´t just a content issue. We are at the point where we will challenge organizations, even those who want to engage us to say, "Save your money and your time and let's really work the systemic issues first."
KE: Give us an example of how an organization would use leadership development as a diagnostic tool.
DD: We are working with an organization right now, a very large bank that has been doing action learning at the top of the organization. In addition to coming up with new ideas for how to serve customers, or new ideas for how to manage risks, these action learning teams are also coming up with systemic issues around unwritten rules, things in the culture that keep the organization from moving forward. This is a byproduct of the executive development process. It wasn't the initial agenda, but it´s now come up in these action learning teams reporting and I think good executive development not only trains and develops, (brings new information, educates, creates learning), but also serves as a diagnostic. When you have a group of executives together, you can learn a lot about the culture in the organization.
KE: This reminds me of the experience we have probably all had, where we have gone off to some sort of training event and gotten excited about an idea, brought it back to the organization and met with the response, "that´s not the way we do things around here."
DD: When we contract or work with companies, we work with major pharmaceutical companies and certainly financial services, technology companies, entertainment, around the world, we make this diagnostic a part of leadership development an important part of engagement. In other words, it is not just fixing leaders but it is also creating a voice, back to the client to say here is what your leaders think and feel, and sometimes outsiders can facilitate that process.
KE: What is typically done to help leaders build their capacity in each of the three areas: head, heart and guts?
DD: In terms of leadership development today, a lot of times it´s really choosing the right method. I have said in public speeches, books and articles that we haven´t had a lot of great innovations in leadership development. It's been an incremental evolutionary approach without much in the way of breakthroughs. Maybe the last real innovation was 360 feedback. Where we are today, around building the head skills, is a lot of times companies rely on training. Lots of executive classroom learning is simply getting people to think, analyze cognitively, and solve problems.
And if you want a leader to develop their heart what do we have? 360 insight, coaching. In the book Leadership Passages we talked about the fact that a lot of times people's hearts are developed or opened though passages that are hard to prescribe; professional or personal failure, being thrown in a stretch assignment over your head, being made into a General Manager, divorce ... things like that can often expand people´s heart, but they are hard to prescribe. We can´t really say, "Why don´t you go have a failure and come back?" It doesn´t work that way. Also, how do you really grow people in the whole risk-taking, guts area?
Lots of times it's throwing people into sink or swim projects, giving them stretch assignments. We do a lot of simulation. That can also be an effective way to develop people's guts.
KE: Where can we look for additional opportunities for leaders to grow their capacity?
DD: Let´s talk about leading with the head. One of the things we think leaders need to do in order to be more effective is to have a point of view. A lot of executive programs that we run are about helping leaders have and articulate their point of view. Where do they think the business is going? Where is the world going? What do they think is important, and then being able to articulate it. People follow people who have a point of view, not an immutable point of view, but certainly a clear one. The capacity to think like a customer, because that´s where the power is shifting to now, is so critical.
We can identify effective leaders based on those who think and act and understand what customers are like versus those that can´t. Some people just instinctively have that capacity to think like a customer. That´s why companies prescribe customer visits and the whole idea to think like a customer and maintain that customer viewpoint. Also, we believe it is critical to help leaders develop a global mindset - that is, understanding the global forces that are all around us that are becoming more important every day.
When we coach people one of the first questions I ask is, "What do you read? Where do you get your information? Do you read The Economist, The Wall Street Journal? Do you look around the world? Or do you just simply rely on FOX or CNN to get your information. Do you have a point of view and do you look to see where the world is going?" And then finally, I ask, "Are you able to challenge the way we do things around here?" That´s the hardest to do. When you are in a strong culture, re-thinking the way things are done is very hard to do.
In terms of leading with heart we talk in the book about the tough job to balance the needs of people with what the business requires. Really developing people in the organization is a hard skill. Building trust across internal boundaries and silos and leveraging these relationships to execute the business strategy, and I could say a lot about that. But we have found that organizational architecture today needs to be flexible and leaders need to be able to create trust across boundaries and build networks. Most importantly, they need to be able to work with people who are different. It's not unusual to look at the senior leadership group and they all look alike, talk alike, act alike. Building a diverse culture with people with diverse viewpoints and appreciating and valuing that is an important part of leading with heart.
And then finally, leading with guts. We talk in the book about acting with unyielding integrity. This is the capacity to lead change and challenge the status quo, even if it means that you might personally be at risk in some way. That´s a big part of telling the truth: managing risk and trade-off decisions and solving problems without sacrificing the long-term. Constantly balancing the short and the long-term and then sometimes making decisions with just limited information. We work with a lot of CEOs and senior leaders on this ability to act intuitively. Sometimes not even being able to explain why you know what you do but being able to act in the face of significant stress is important and finally, building a climate for innovation.
So, all of these things create a whole leader and some companies we are working with have put this into their hiring process as well in terms of assessing candidates based on their capacity to demonstrate head, heart and guts.
KE: Of the three: head, heart, and guts - what´s the hardest to develop?
DD: I think heart is hardest to develop. Because organizations don´t value it and people are very afraid of appearing soft or of over-focusing on people´s needs. Most large companies today are rational systems and it´s hard to make an argument for the feeling side of an organization. I have the privilege of contrasting leader´s public persona with their private persona, which is what we get through coaching. It´s surprising how often people are unwilling to expose their vulnerabilities or to emphasize the feeling side of the organization. Even if it means not acting on it, only acknowledging it, because I think senior leaders are afraid of appearing weak. So, I would say the heart side of leadership is often the hardest to develop and it´s often what we focus on. I think all executive coaches try to emphasize that the heart is what people follow.
KE: You mentioned a little earlier that we haven´t experienced much innovation in the leadership development arena. Why is that?
DD: I think a lot of times it's because companies have not emphasized leadership development as a competitive advantage and therefore not nearly enough resources, time and attention have been put toward it. I know there is a lot of whining about this in companies, but I also think it's true. We are seeing that change incidentally as boards get interested in talent, as talent becomes a kind of competitive differentiator. Even as Wall Street is getting interested in the talent pipeline of organizations, we are seeing that change. And I think another reason is because innovations haven´t transferred across industries nearly enough.
KE: An audience member asks, "Is every executive capable of being developed. How do you determine that they are developable and how do you handle when they are not?"
DD: I guess at this stage of my career, I do believe that people can be developed provided there is willingness to change. What coaching and learning do is to expand people´s repertoire of leadership behaviors and add new ones. If the willingness is there and the insight around what behaviors work is also there, I think people can change. Those are two big conditions that have to be met, and sometimes they are not. The ways you know that they are not there is to see lack of commitment, lack of follow though, unwillingness to exert discipline and stick with it. It's like any behavior change that I engage in.
I know when I am committed and when I am just convincing myself I am committed and a lot of times it comes down to follow through and commitment. I think the same thing is true of leadership behavior. In fact I tell CEOs you can change, leaders can change, but it really comes down to understanding that leadership is often behavioral and you have to really work at it.
KE: And I think it´s answering that underlying question, "Why should I change?"
DD: Yes, I think there has to be a very clear either business or personal case for change. It can´t be just my boss wants me to. Sometimes you have to do some archeological digging to get to that motivation and often, it isn´t what is expressed. But I think that´s true for all of us. We change when we are ready.
KE: This question from a member of our live audience asked, "Given so many leadership models out there, what are three new things about your model?"
DD: We present this framework to many senior teams and they instantly get it. There are probably competencies associated with all three capacities (head, heart, guts) in everybody´s leadership model, but it's the simplicity and the idea that you need integration of head, heart and guts - that I think is the simple presentation maybe of old ideas.
KE: Another question asks, "What types of assessments do you to use to gauge a person´s head, heart, and guts?"
DD: Well lots of times it´s feedback, either peer feedback or 360 feedback. I think the best assessment of leadership strength comes from the direct reports who watch and see leaders day in and day out. We do a lot of executive assessment and we use a variety of tools including a kind of group evaluation methodology that Mercer Delta uses called The Gems, where you get people together to assess people´s strengths. We certainly use personality assessments. We use a kind of self-report measure as well. I mean all of these assessment methodologies, simulation, having people watch, seeing what strengths people manifest in the simulation, all of these things can be used to identify strengths. Marcus talks about behavioral interviewing and asks the people to tell stories about how they handle certain situations as a way of understanding what people´s strengths are as well.
KE: You talked a little earlier about the need to build the leadership pipeline and how the CEOs in your study had indicated, 75% of them I believe, that there are gaps in their leadership pipeline. What would you like to see included in the leadership pipeline development process that you typically don´t see?
DD: Well I think it's important to take a prospective look at the future. You might have pipeline weaknesses today based on what future requirements are. This is where we engage executive committees in the diagnostic process or discussion. CEOs typically complain about the pipeline, there are not enough people, they are not ready. A lot of times the future is not well described and it doesn´t match up with what the pipeline is producing, or people are not being valued correctly in terms of what they bring and so the pipeline is seen as insufficient.
I had a conversation with a CEO a couple of weeks ago, and he has 100,000 people in his company. He said, "I just don´t have any leaders in my pipeline." I said, "You have got to be kidding! 100,000 people in this organization and you can´t find leaders to fulfill your pipeline." What does that say? Often, it says that they can´t find people to fill the current model and that is diagnostic, I think.
KE: What is that you recommend our members do with the information you have provided?
DD: Well, one question to ask is, "Where is your organization in terms of head, heart and guts?" And in the book we ask some questions that you can use. Such questions as: What do you focus on? How would you describe your CEO? How would you describe your culture? All of these things can tell you whether you´re an organization that focuses on head, heart and guts, or which one(s). Also we think that by looking at your organization in terms of head, heart and guts you can start a conversation and sometimes it´s a simple conversation about what do we value around here? What do we need to do to change it? Do we need more heart? Do we need more guts? Sometimes, that simple conversation can lead to change.
If you´d like to learn more about this topic, we encourage you to purchase Head, Heart and Guts - How the World´s Best Companies Develop Complete Leaders, written by David. L. Dotlich, Peter C. Cairo and Stephen H. Rhinesmith.
