Bridge skills gap to ready yourself for the top job
Increasingly young CEOs must be empowered to take on senior roles
PEOPLE are constantly in a race to make it to the top. We have been brainwashed to believe that ultimate success is about making it to the next level as fast as possible.
Companies reaffirm this way of thinking by promoting high performers while having limited regard for whether the person’s current role has prepared them for the senior ones that follow — roles which may require a different skill set.
This approach worked for a long time and made sense in the past when it took many years to get to the top. Companies banked on the fact that, at some point, the person would eventually acquire the skills needed to succeed in a big role.
This is not always true, especially if you look at the world of politics, where success tends to be influenced more by years of commitment to the political party and the relationships built over time than whether you have the skills to lead the party.
The traditional approach to promoting people is far less appropriate today because people are promoted faster and while much younger.
Studies show the average age of CEOs continues to decrease. The main challenge with this is that there is a higher risk of having CEOs and senior executives who have critical skills gaps and could make mistakes that would not be typical for someone at their level.
And the price for these mistakes can be high the higher the person is in the organisation.
The mistake is not in promoting people with limited years of work experience. It is important to infuse the kinds of leaders who can bring fresh, creative and innovative ideas to a changing world. The mistake is not empowering those leaders with the skills to succeed in the big role.
Notice my emphasis on skills acquisition, rather than years of experience.
The solution to this is not to revert to the old-school model of promoting people based on the number of years they have stuck around.
Leaders today need to challenge themselves in acquiring the skills needed to be ready for the bigger position.
We need to stop the cycle of wanting to climb higher without regard for how we are going to address our skills gap when we get there.
Organisations and their HR departments have an even bigger responsibility because they need to lead this mindset shift. They need to encourage and celebrate leaders who develop a wide variety of important management skills as much as they value climbing up the ladder.
It should not be an anomaly when someone prefers to shift to the same level in another department in order A man rests on his cart after unloading bundles of colourful plastic jugs near a shop at a market in Colombo, Sri Lanka, this week to learn new skills; this should be the norm for those who aspire to make it to the top.
There is a reason that companies such as GE are so successful at consistently developing leaders of CEO calibre. It is one of the few companies in the world that can claim to have created a high volume of successful CEOs and executives.
It achieves this by making sure that
Mindset shift is going to be tricky among the current generation of millennials
its fast-tracked development plan involves exposing its leaders to a variety of roles, functions and skills. Even though this happens in a short period, its leaders become successful because they are developed in a holistic way. They have fewer gaps in their management skills profile.
This approach is sometimes referred to as “horizontal development”, where individuals value developing adjacent skills that will help when they reach that big position.
This mindset shift is going to be tricky, especially among the current generation of millennials who have not been shown the value of using horizontal development.
Not addressing this is the reason that many young start-up company founders end up having to step down mainly because they were great at developing an innovative idea, in a small company, with a small team.
Steve Jobs of Apple, Andrew Mason of Groupon and Mike Lazaridis of BlackBerry are famous examples. Running a bigger venture requires a different skill set.
This mindset shift has big implications for young high performers because they are constantly being promoted, only to wake up one day, look back and realise all the growth areas they missed along the way.
Sikhakhane is an international speaker, writer and business adviser with an honours degree in business science from the University of Cape Town and an MBA from Stanford University