Building leadership bench strength has never been easy, but it has always been possible.
Corporate titans like Merck, Edward Jones, PepsiCo, Walmart and others have burnished their brands, cultures and bottom lines by becoming factories for leadership talent. And some less-famous titans like Fifth-Third Bank, Gundersen Health and KBR have similarly, but more quietly, built and sustained efforts that grow leaders from within, stockpiling exceptional leaders with the capability to step up as business calls.
Organizations enjoying strong bench strength have long been in the minority, but recent years have distinguished the leadership factories as even more rarified. In 2011, 18 percent of organizations around the world reported strong bench strength. Since then, like a pinhole in a car tire, leadership capability has gradually deflated—leaving only 12 percent with strong benches today.
Building a Strong Bench Is No Guarantee of Keeping It
Succession management, when done right, cultivates bench strength across the entire pipeline by accelerating growth to yield more leaders with the capability to take on bigger assignments. It is a long-form exercise. And like fitness, it’s much easier to get out of shape than into it.
HR leaders from organizations like the ones mentioned above are like great fitness trainers. They keep management focused on the right actions and investments to ensure leadership growth meets emerging demands. Keeping them motivated can be a difficult job.
As life’s velocity hammers at the human attention span, more and more business leaders lose focus on the bench. Few have ever glimpsed what the 12 percent have come to know: strong succession management pays off in big ways. The bench-builders enjoy exponentially stronger leadership quality, better retention of top talent, higher employee engagement, less burnout and dominant returns at the bottom line.
But sadly, most companies seem to have concluded (consciously or not) that growing leadership from within is too slow and difficult. Programs that accelerate leadership growth have declined in prevalence at the very moment when their impact could be more transformational than ever.
Among the reasons for the backsliding are several toxic perspectives which, if unchallenged, can take root and paralyze succession efforts. On the surface, each of these viewpoints sounds harmless, even productive. But they are insidious, and often disrupt succession efforts to the point of standstill. Leadership growth becomes deprioritized as a non-essential business function, and business leaders find workarounds for the lack of skilled successors, resorting to risky external hiring, job restructuring or simply placement of ill-equipped leaders into mission-critical roles.
Toxic Perspective 1: ‘Ready With Development’
This label was used repeatedly in a day-long talent review at a prominent financial services corporation. Dozens of high-performing leaders were discussed and deemed to have strong potential for larger assignments, but only after additional development would they be viewed as fully ready.
But there was a problem. This wasn’t the first talent review, and most of these leaders had previously been labeled “ready with development.” Many had carried the tag for several years or more.
The CEO lost patience. He halted the meeting, declaring, “This process is broken.” He and his leadership team had, only a few weeks previously, inked a plan for a crucial business pivot. But as the picture of a stagnant leadership bench became clear, the viability of the plan turned questionable.
The term “ready with development” can be dangerous, even if it’s true. When organizations commit the time and energy to a talent review, it can feel like progress when the review is complete. Leaders are discussed and evaluated, and a deeper understanding of the status of bench strength is achieved. But in actuality, nothing has yet happened to leadership capability.
To properly prepare for higher-level roles, leaders may need project leadership assignments, P&L experience, multi-team leadership, broader product exposure, global market insight, stronger followership, fewer partner altercations and so on.
These specifics are important because they trigger action—on the parts of both management and high-potential leaders. Without that emphasis on development action, management is led to believe leaders will grow from “ready with development” to “ready now” as a natural outcome of performing in their current jobs. They seldom do.
Toxic Perspective 2: ‘We Need To Test for Potential’
“In our company, management wouldn’t know potential if it were staring them in the face.”
This remark by a director of executive succession is not uncommon, and is often true. The definition of leadership potential is not well-understood.
Many organizations have abandoned efforts to enhance bench strength solely because they have been stalled by the challenge of fairly and accurately addressing the concept of leadership potential. And worse, many have deployed tests of potential in ways that undermine cultural values and cause associates to feel they have lost agency in their own career growth.
Several key distinctions are essential when seeking to find and unleash leadership potential:
Potential is not performance. Performance is how well one is performing in relation to the expectations of their current position, and it is best measured with a strong performance management system that involves clear objective-setting, continuous feedback and dialogue and development planning to ensure ongoing growth.
Potential is not readiness. Readiness is the extent to which an individual is prepared to meet the specific challenges of a future role (or category of roles such as front-line leader or executive). Because of the emphasis on the future, current performance is only minimally useful in assessing readiness. Simulations, behavioral interviews and valid inventories of job-related characteristics are needed as well to make more predictive readiness assessments.
Potential is a possibility, not a trait. Leadership potential is the likelihood that an individual will develop the capabilities required for higher-level leadership roles. Acquiring new capabilities can be enabled by foundational characteristics like curiosity, openness to feedback and learning orientation. And because these characteristics are measurable, many organizations have employed tests of potential as scalable means of identifying people with more or less of it.
While on the surface testing for potential may add efficiency and objectivity, it can be over-emphasized to the point of inaccuracy, less inclusion and cultural damage. This happens when leadership potential tests are installed as surrogates for management judgment.
By far the more powerful organizational lever is to deepen management’s understanding of potential as something to be cultivated and catalyzed, as opposed to simply assessed and reported to management like a report card or health exam.
Outsourcing the evaluation of potential to a test causes management to blindly adopt the paralyzing belief that they can’t affect it. But they can. Unleashing potential is not only about understanding a person’s characteristics. It is also about understanding how those characteristics intersect with the individual’s context, and when to take action that puts potential in motion.
Toxic Perspective 3: ‘Everyone Is Accountable for Their Own Development’
Ringing through hallways and Zoom calls in organizations around the world is one simple but devastating myth that bench strength flourishes when individuals take accountability for their own growth. Wrong.
Make no mistake, learning and development are crucial to every person and company, and when individuals take initiative to make it happen, organizations benefit. But projecting that value onto the health of a succession bench is another matter entirely, and doing so can cripple efforts to prepare leadership for the future.
Decades ago, organizations operating in less dynamic circumstances took stock of bench strength by examining the corporate org chart. Critical positions were highlighted and potential successors were listed underneath each box, often ranked by how much time was believed to be necessary until they would be ready for promotion.
Over time, these succession charts were rendered obsolete by delayered organizations with fewer levels on the chart, bigger skill gaps between levels and radically dynamic organizations that restructured more frequently and placed ever-changing demands on leaders.
The challenge of building bench strength shifted from watching and waiting for leaders to become ready to finding more aggressive ways to accelerate growth beyond the normal course of one’s job. Special assignments, job rotations and accelerated development programs were built to hasten the rate at which leaders were exposed to challenges they would otherwise not encounter. Only through management’s intervention could leaders gain access to the challenges and experiences that would prepare them for a future that was coming faster than ever before.
Through this lens, it’s clear why today the axiom “everyone is accountable for their own development” is insufficient to enhance bench strength. Individual leaders (or non-leaders) cannot assign themselves to significant new projects, teams or challenges. Management must own accountability for making growth experiences happen, and some companies have institutionalized these mechanisms.
The organizations listed in the introduction above are just some of those who have converted their talent processes from “watching and waiting” to regular conversations aimed at generating more involvement in the organization’s most complex and consequential challenges. Leaders are assessed against the standards and expectations of roles multiple levels above their current jobs, sparking feedback and development plans that, over time, transform the leadership bench to one that is actively preparing for the future.
Conclusion
A common thread among organizations that avoid these banes of bench strength is a commitment to preparing leadership for an uncertain future. Senior executives acknowledge the connection between bench strength and organizational performance, and they extend that link to their own accountabilities by making powerful growth experiences happen for emerging leaders. To confront toxic perspectives and achieve this mindset, executives should seek the expertise and influence of HR leaders. These talent pros lead management away from a passive mindset to an energized, engaged team of catalysts who establish leadership growth as a cultural and business asset. They build the talent factories—the few organizations who continue to differentiate their cultures and bottom lines with benches of leaders ready to step up.
