leadership

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Who’s next in line?

February 22, 2010 in Ideas by Betsy Garside | No comments

The Wall Street Journal had a good story on how Frontier Communications set up a succession plan. A few years ago, the CEO matched her key lieutenants with board members for coaching and development. Word is that the system, while not perfect, is working. If CEO Maggie Wilderotter went off to sail the world for three years tomorrow, Frontier has strong leaders at the next level who could step in temporarily or maybe permanently.

While Frontier is getting lauded, corporate board members at the biggest U.S. companies feel their organizations’ succession planning is not so praiseworthy: According to a 2009 survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers and Corporate Board Member magazine, four in 10 corporate board members are not happy with succession planning. That’s up from the 2007 numbers.

If this is true at large corporations, with arguably more manpower and money to devote to considering and resolving management issues, then how are nonprofits doing at succession planning? How different would results of this survey be among members of nonprofit boards?

Nonprofits usually have a passionate CEO who devotes his or her life to the cause. And because mission dedication and management skills must mesh at the top, when it’s time to pass the baton boards may have to work with interim leadership for a long time as that next perfect leader is found or developed. At the same time, management training is not usually in the budget at any level of a nonprofit. Yet the training opportunity Maggie Wilderotter created is essentially free, and nonprofit boards are often rich with varied management strengths.

Is it clear who’s next in line at your organization? And if not, what’s the plan for planning?

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A silo-busting leadership thought from Drew Gilpin Faust

November 1, 2009 in Ideas, Uncategorized by Betsy Garside | No comments

Recently, The New York Times interviewed Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard University (and formerly a leader at my alma mater). She told a short story of asking Michael Porter to run a session at a retreat with the deans of Harvard’s various schools, as she sought to “build cohesiveness and integration” across the multi-tentactled behemoth that is Harvard University. Apparently, Porter asked the group, “How does being part of Harvard University give you an unfair advantage?”

Dr. Faust thought this was just the right question, because it asked each dean to consider how his or her school — medical, law, divinity, you name it — was better positioned to succeed because it is one of the behemoth’s tentacles. As Dr. Faust put it, this great question “allocated to [the deans] a self-interest in buying into the larger university purposes but also the aspiration of thinking about how we can all be better together.”

So how could a “right question” like this help you, a leader in your own organization, align interests toward the larger whole? What do you want your “deans” — directors, or managers, or vice presidents — thinking about so that they not only own their own success, but see the larger picture and want to contribute to making it a rosy one?

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Tackling a little-known management issue

October 7, 2009 in Ideas by Betsy Garside | No comments

Steven DiMaio’s latest blog post on Harvard Business Publishing caught my eye. The title is just great: “How to Train Your Pet Peeve.” And he’s tackling something that management training doesn’t traditionally cover: How to manage the little but persistent interaction reactions that can break down a team, a department, a project or process.

It’s a great read, and it got me wondering what would happen if a department had a meeting around their collective pet peeves. What would it be like to write down your top two or three pet peeves, then bring them to a departmental or team meeting? (I say write them down ahead of time so there can’t be too much “yeah, me too” along political or hierarchical lines). Might you find fault lines that you never knew were there, that you can now address because the trigger-points are out in the open?

Somebody try this — and then share what you uncover!

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