Astrology for Business

Research outlined in the previous section indicated that the number one factor for leadership development was having a variety of experiences in multiple functions, organizations, companies, industries, countries, and cultures. Larger companies have the advantage in that they can offer these experiences.

The concept is simple and yet the implementation is often voiced out by senior executives as “there must be a better way.”

Conceptually, we are consciously moving people periodically into new positions which offer the individuals new opportunities to personally development, to bring in a fresh perspective to the position, and for the individual to deliver the results expected from the position.

This is not quite so easy in practice because:

• Some positions require such deep expertise that very few people could step into the particular position and be successful.
• Timing may be such that the development needs of an individual may be optimally addressed in a position held by a person who for a variety of reasons is best left in the position for the time being.
• A key developmental position may be currently held by a person who desires to stay there for a long period, is doing a very good job, and will probably need to be dynamited from the position.
• Extra attention needs to be paid to the development of females and minorities because of statistics indicating progress needs to be made in certain areas.
• Each senior leader has a tendency to resist letting go of his best people to other parts of the company. Furthermore they are resistant to taking on individuals from other parts of the company to run their key positions because of a lack of comfort. Sometimes just the opposite happens and the leader is pulling in the best talent from other parts of the company and not letting go of his own talent.
• The conversations by senior leaders to work out the moves is stifled by the bureaucracy of the process and a lack of teamwork.
• The succession management process is typically conducted once or twice a year while movement of people into positions occurs year-round.

My experience in developing systems for succession management is to keep it as simple as possible and maximize the conversations while minimizing the preparation and shuffling of paperwork.

In the past I have been skeptical of third party systems to do this because they had turned out to be very cumbersome, expensive and complicated to setup and use.

I have an idea for a process which I have not tried yet.  It relies on social networking and is quite simple in concept, easy to set up and virtually free. The idea would be to put together a social networking web application which can be done very easily using an application like WordPress.

The users of the application (i.e. the only people who would have access to it) would be each leader of each business/function and ideally be 10 to 20 people.

The application would contain a blog for each position directly reporting to all of the business/function leaders and also all the positions for the next layer down. Each blog would contain a description of the position. This description would be put together by the person currently holding the position and then uploaded to the web by the administrator of the web. Each position would be put in one of three categories: position currently vacant, position to be vacant within 6 months, position to be vacant in greater than 6 months. This way any senior leader can click on a particular category and see all positions with that status. There will also be a unique tag for each position identifying its name. More on this shortly.

There will also be a blog for each person currently holding each of the identified positions as well as for people who are currently at the next level below these positions AND identified as high potential and ready to move up to this next layer of leadership. For each of these people there will be a bio included in the blog which can be put together by each of these individuals and uploaded by the web administrator. Furthermore, each person’s blog could have a category that indicates: The person is ready to move to a new position now, in 6 months, or beyond 6 months. As with the positions, there will be a unique tag for each person.

Now the fun can begin. One of the business/function leaders could easily do a search (with one click) on all the open or soon to be open positions. She could then with another single click do a search on all people currently ready to move to a new position. Any of the users can propose consideration of a person for a position by adding the person’s tag to the position and the position’s tag to the person. The same leader can add comments to the person’s or the position’s blog. This would create a continuous dialog with the business/function leaders for open positions.

Has anyone tried anything like this before? What else have you tried that worked?