Customer Reviews

The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership Powered Company

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

What do General Electric, Citigroup, and Marriott International have in common? They have built on the original conceptual work by Walt Mahler at General Electric to establish sustainable methods to developing management breadth and depth. This valuable book outlines the key principles of that current best practice.

At a time when more and more companies are relying on headhunters to bring in leaders and management turnover is soaring among young talent, "growing your own" leaders is about to become a necessary core competence for the future. While almost everyone who is interested in the subject has read glossy articles about what General Electric does at its Crotonville facility, this book provides the core of the broader management process behind those articles.

The first part of the book focuses on six key transitions that help a leader develop. The second part shows you how to diagnose how individual leaders are doing, and how to help them make better progress.

The six transitions are:

from managing yourself to managing others

from managing others to managing managers

from managing managers to functional managing

from functional managing to business managing

from business managing to group managing

from group managing to enterprise managing.

At each transition, what the individual values and focuses on has to change dramatically. In organizations where this transition is not made explicit, you get almost all of the managers in the organization "stuck" doing things the wrong way, still looking from the perspective of their last job. That's the stuff that Dilbert and the Peter Principle are made of.

Although the book takes a large organization's point of view, in various places the points are translated into a small organizational context.

Based on my experience with leaders at all these levels, I certainly agree with the authors' points about the key challenges involved. I also think that their diagnostic methods are good. In most cases, the root cause for the problem lies further up in the organization with someone who is not focusing or working on helping managers develop.

The key weakness of the book is that in some elements the reader with limited business experience will still not be sure what to do. For example, the step from a functional manager to a business manager requires integrating all of the functions and perspectives in order to be successful. That is an enormous leap in knowledge, expertise, and experience. Although business school cases will help those with that experience, most managers will find it impossible to make the transition unless the business is very undemanding -- something that seldom happens any more.

My own experience suggests that basic learning has to be pursued throughout the organization that emphasizes skills like problem solving, locating and implementing the next generation of best practices, and developing a deep understanding of how to create superior business processes as the foundation for this kind of leadership development program. In advanced companies, you can add the concept of having people develop skills for innovating new business models. Then, this leadership development process can become truly powerful.

However you decide to go about it, the examples of setbacks and progress outlined in this excellent book will improve your ability to think about improving leadership in your organization. I urge you to read, consider, and apply what you learn.

After you have finished thinking about and using the book, I suggest that you also think about where else in your company you do not have a management process to do something important. For example, do you have a management process to keep you aligned with powerful trends beyond your control? Do you have a management process to create superior business models?

Be all the leader you can be!

This book gives you a thoughtful and reasoned look at the upward transitions process. It does an excellent job of outlining the needs and potential problems at each career stage. The advice is usable by three groups of potential readers.

You should buy this book if you are a senior manager, human resources executive, or board member in a company of any size who wants to understand the dynamics of leadership development/succession planning in a large company. The book outlines several transitions and the changes in skills and attitudes that are needed at each one, along with relevant pitfalls.

You should buy this book if you are a manager on an upward career trajectory and you want to learn what's ahead and what skills and attitudes you need to develop as well as what possible problems lie in wait. The chapter that describes your next transition will outline what you will have to do and what you will have to do better.

You should buy this book if you supervise other managers and you want some insight into analyzing performance issues and helping your people develop.

What are the negatives?

This book is written for people in big companies. With the exception of a couple of pages early in the book, managers in small to mid-sized businesses will need to figure out how this applies to them. This is not a big issue because of the range of material covered and the clarity of the presentation, but it still will be irritating to some readers.

The big company whose shadow falls across this book is General Electric. That's not a bad thing in itself. GE does a marvelous job of leadership development. What you have to watch for, though, are unstated assumptions that other companies have the same culture and values as GE, or even that values matter as much everywhere else.

For example, the authors state that "formal training for first line managers is fairly common." That's not true in the majority of US companies today.

The authors state that "managers who aren't cut out for this role should be put on an individual contributor track." But in many companies there is no individual contributor "track." Only managing others leads you to higher status and higher pay.

While there is a lot of good material handling the various transitions, you won't find much on deciding who should be promoted in the first place. But that's the only significant gap I see in this excellent book. Judging who to promote is a key decision and a key component of the success of the promotion.

The bottom line is that this is an excellent book, filled with material that can be used by people in many different situations.

Reading this 'leadership pipeline' I became really astonished of seeing here all the ideas of Elliott Jaques and Gillian Stamp (Bioss International) just copied with no reference to them. I keep wondering how can that be done. Jaques and Gillian Stamp has written for so many years about human capability and seven levels of work complexity that are clearly repeated in this book withouth no comment to them. Even the general themes are there, for example managing other, leader of leader, managing a business unit, managing a group of business unit. If you don't beleive me, just read Requisite Organization (Jaques) and previous ones, for example, and you will learn that Jaques' ideas are being developed for more than 30 years. So, better learn with the real creative people that has really done researches around the theme.

Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, and James Noel, seasoned business consultants and authors of The Leadership Pipeline, believe that many businesses grow their company's leadership base by incorrectly, leaning upon marketplace superstars instead of internally groomed leaders. They are convinced that developmental failure in raising leaders from within a company significantly hinders organizations from realizing growth potential. The leadership growth process, known as the leadership pipeline, provides a concrete, goal oriented, obtainable model for organizations seeking to build a leadership development culture within their organization.

Their vision for leadership development contains many merits. It is based on the accurate assumptions that people are trusted and competent leaders as they traverse through the pipeline and up the managerial structure of their organization. The model encourages a developmental, training posture towards people in leadership roles, offering hope that people can obtain skills in order to make next steps of influence with a company. The developmental process is largely an internal one, eschewing the frequent temptation to find the illusive celebrity CEO for internal leadership growth instead. Lastly, they helpfully recognize that different levels of leadership roles require varying degrees and types of expertise. This means that leaders need to embrace and press into the challenge of learning new and very different skills than previously required from former positions. Thus they argue that key character traits of a leader is to expand as a learner as one ascends to higher levels of organizational influence.

The Leadership Pipeline rightly points out that micromanaging people, interfering with the tasks assigned to those under one's leadership, and similar distracting meddling has the dual impact of retarding a leader's growth in their present position and undermining the growth of those beneath the leader, to the detriment of the whole organization. Instead, careful directive leadership helps people develop into self-sufficient leaders (i.e. not reliant upon the next level of leadership to attain to essential tasks.)

Effective change usually begins with raising awareness and this book does an effective job of raising the awareness level of the need for continuous development. Too often we promote (or hire in) our top performers to increasing leadership responsibility and expect the shift in skills to magically occur. The Pipeline provides a unique perspective on the why/how/when of leadership transitions.......good cornerstone development tool!

In my reading of the "Leadership Pipeline," I found it to be a fascinating look at all levels of management, albeit a somewhat unconfirmable one. The purpose of the book seems to be to outline, then advocate what it calls "The Leadership Pipeline." Think of it like a long drainage pipe system, with six intersections symbolizing six transitions in management (each of which can run smoothly or become clogged based on managers values and behavioral traits), all the way from entry level employee to CEO. The book takes the approach that every entry level employee, if they possessed the drive and willingness to change can become the CEO of any company they choose. In fact, the book so strongly advocates this position that it maintains that this is the best way to create the ultimate CEO from the very first pages.

It is this belief that I found to be somewhat irritating as I read through the book. The notion that an entry level worker based in sales with no degree could become a more qualified CEO than their more educated counterparts was a little hard for me to swallow. The Leadership Pipeline does not actually advocate replacing more educated workers with less educated ones, but it does continuously profess that the best way to groom a leader at any leadership level is to ensure that they have gained the experience necessary by following all of the steps of the leadership pipeline model which have come before it, and all of those steps should be taken within the same company. It seems almost as concerned with advocating the implementation of its own design as it does offering constructive criticism to better the current system of business management. The book also fails to take into account what happens to the worker who gets laid off due to corporate takeovers, mergers, etc.

That said, it does offer a number of good points on how to become a more effective leader. The most important of which is how it dispels the notion that one can cling to the elements of their job which made them successful at previous management levels. At each level of management (the book professes) a worker must take a step back and re-evaluate what exactly their job at that level becomes. It offers means by which one can generate positive communication and feedback so that the manager can truly become an effective leader. The way it goes on to illustrate the key traits of successful managers at each "intersection" by way of useful real life examples and anecdotes was one of the books major strengths and helped the flow tremendously. The language in which the book is written is geared to any audience, and in light of the admittedly dry material, it made it run more smoothly.

One of the biggest problems I had with the book was it seems to have been written for an incredibly limited audience. The advice it gives on how to eliminate management problems at most of the "intersections" could only really be applied by extremely high levels of management which few actually achieve. I must admit I am still an undergraduate college student so my perspective is limited, but I cannot imagine how a great number of the concepts in this book would be useful to anyone other than those in the realm of vice president or CEO, and even if the principals were appropriate to that audience, they would have to be a member of a global multi billion dollar corporation with similar levels of management and positions discussed in the book.

In the end I give it a 3 out of 5.

I found the concepts described in this text to be dated and somewhat out of touch with the demands of today's flexible, high speed organization. While the concepts developed in the book are thought provoking, I found it very frustrating reading because each chapter is written independently and likely by different authors. The format and flow of each of the chapters describing the leadership transitions varies so much that it's hard to make comparisons from one level to the next. A compilation of the transitional indicators would have been valuable - there is one in the first chapter but not in any of the others. If you read it, plan on taking notes on each chapter so you can make sense of it in the end.

The books is thorough if not a bit repetitive. Basically, there are (one too many) stages of leadership, each with it's own unique skill set and value system. When a manager moves up without recognizing the shifts in skills or values needed, misery ensues. This is all very true and it hurts a little to read how things can go wrong at every level.

It may be best to keep the book around during your professional life and check in every once in a while to make sure you are leveraging the right skills and valuing the right work. I would recommend this book but since only one section is relevant at a time, I would say buy and keep for the long term or borrow from a friend.

The downside of this book is no color inside and few visuals.

Great book for managing your own development 'climbing the ladder' of transitions because the book has defined competencies by level and examples, which you can consider for yourself & situation.

MUST READ for aspiring HR managers and line managers serious about talent management. Should be in any HR degree curiculum !

Know as "The Book" in response and solution to "The War for Talent", which unlocks the secrets of GE talent management.

Leadership Pipeline
by Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter and James Noel

The significant contribution of this book is to distinguish the changing target of responsibility as you go up the ladder. The authors define 7 levels of management, and identify what is required to successfully navigate the six transitions to the top. They also explain how the same principles can be applied to a smaller company with fewer layers.

The book is well laid out, logical, and the use of bullets and subheads make it easy to follow. Each level includes warning signs of someone not performing at the right level, as well as guidelines for appropriate management activities for their level. These features provide the opportunity to diagnose what's going well or going wrong. In between advice they present useful case studies to bring the examples to life.

For example, managers of managers "need to shift their accountability focus" from individual contributor to the quality of management that their managers provide to their staff. This is an extremely important distinction and one not frequently addressed by management resources. It is also extraordinarily refreshing to see them define an important responsibility of "silo buster."

While the goal of the book is ostensibly to help companies build capacity among their managers, the value is so broad it should be read by any senior level manager, not just someone who regards their responsibility to be succession planning.