High Flyers: Developing the Next Generation of Leaders

Don't hold your breath if you're waiting for your company to hand out a blueprint for your professional growth as an emerging executive. In a book packed with sensible and thought-provoking advice, Morgan W. McCall Jr.'s overriding message is that aspiring executives are responsible for their own development. He believes that few organizations are structured to promote the proper training of young, promising executives, although they should do a better job. He says rising leaders should create their own breaks, embrace opportunities to gain experience, and view adversity as an ideal situation for learning. McCall hammers home the point that the only power you really have is over yourself. Be proactive, or pull up a lawn chair and watch as the parade passes. getAbstract wholeheartedly endorses the author's lessons on how to groom leaders and how to grow as a leader. If you want it, go and get it.

As an avid read of "leadership development" books, I found High Flyers very stimulating and thought-provoking. While I believe that talent is more than "the ability to learn", I do believe leaders who have this quality are best able to leverage their God-given talents and gifts whatever they are. The most important contribution of this for me was the emphasis on the power of experience and the ability to learn from it. With so much emphasis of leadership development being about acquring knowledge and skills, I felt McCall brought balance to this over-emphasis.

You will find a thoughtful, thorough process here for using a company's strategy to delineate what kind of leaders you will need, identify the leadership experiences that can create that type of leader, then to locate those who have the highest potential to develop those capabilities (those who learn rapidly and well), and to monitor progress. This is a very humane book that will help many avoid the painful career derailments that we read about all too often when a top performer suddenly crashes and burns in public.By comparison, most companies are looking for executives with the right stuff for today, not the future. Then in a Darwinian process of survival of the fittest, those with the best track records win the leadership roles. Professor McCall points out a very serious flaw in this model, in that many people progress without developing any better leadership skills. With more and more success, leadership skill may actually drop as strengths and competencies are more and more likely to turn into weaknesses as they become exaggerated and weaknesses stay weak. He uses a detailed case history of Horst Schroeder, who was fired as president of Kellogg's after only 9 months, to make these points. On the usually-correct assumption that your company has not yet brought this new model to bear, the author presents an excellent appendix for helping an individual executive to plan and implement one's own development. "The message of High Flyers is that leadership ability can be learned, that creating a context that supports the development of talent can become a source of competitive advantage, and that the development of leaders is itself a leadership responsibility." I suggest that you consider Jack Welch at General Electric as the embodiment of the truth of this statement.Now let me share my concerns about this book. Most companies change strategies at least as often as they change CEOs. Many do it even more often. The average life of a strategy has to be about 3-5 years. That's too short a time to be the context for a leadership development program, unless the new strategy requires exactly the same kind of leaders -- which is unlikely to be the case. In such environments, leadership recruiting probably deserves more attention than leadership development. On the other hand, strategy should not change so often. As my co-author and I point out in The Irresistible Growth Enterprise, it is possible to have a constant mission, vision, and strategy in the midst of a rapidly changing business environment if you think through the issues of potential volatility in advance. In that sort of company, this book's approach will prosper, as will the company and its stakeholders. I urge you to combine these perspectives and approaches in that way.My other concern is that mission, vision, and emotional context are more important than strategy to success. Professor McCall unaccountably ignored those other important "fit" and "development" issues. They

MCCALL INTRODUCES A MODEL FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE NEXT GENERATION OF LEADERS, SUGGESTING THAT PEOPLE WHO ARE ABLE TO LEARN FROM EXPERIENCE WILL LEARN THE NECESSARY LEADERSHIP SKILLS, IF THEY ARE EXPOSED TO THE RIGHT KIND OF EXPERIENCES, AND IF THEY RECEIVE THE RIGHT KIND OF SUPPORT IN THEIR LEARNING EFFORTS. HE POINTS OUT, THAT IT HAS TO BE THE BUSINESS STRATEGY AS DEFINED BY THE TOP-MANAGEMENT THAT DETERMINES WHICH LEADERSHIP SKILLS ARE REQUIRED FOR THE FUTURE OF THE ORGANISATION, AND WHICH KIND OF EXPERIENCE WILL BE KEY FOR THE INTENDED PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT (188).McCall starts by discussing the nature of leadership skills: are they a set of skills, that one either does have or not, or can they be learned? Based on his previous research he holds, that executive leaders are more made than born. Therefore he asserts that leadership potential can not be identified by looking for a profile of "competencies", but by looking for the ability to acquire the skills that will be needed in the future. Only this approach will insure leadership capability in a world of rapid change (4/5). McCall goes on by contrasting a "selection perspective" and a "developmental perspective". If leadership requirements are seen as a finite set of positive attributes, or "competencies", a leader either has them or not. Experience will be a test to verify whether one has them or not. On the other hand, if leadership requirements are seen as something that can come in multiple possibilities, a leader might obtain them, but also loose them, over time. Experience will be a source of the required attributes. To build the case for a developmental perspective, McCall analyses "derailment" cases, were things went wrong. Using the example of the president of Kellogg Co., Horst Schroeder, he names five factors of initial success, which are common to people who failed at a later stage of their career: track record, brilliance, commitment, charm and ambition (29). When looking at the causes for the turn from success to failure, he lists four elements: 1) strengths can become a weakness, 2) blind spots or weaknesses that did not matter initially, later do matter, 3) success can lead to arrogance and 4) bad luck. (36). McCall then sets out to define what would be the "right kind of experience". He outlines sixteen developmental experiences, coming in four groups: 1) assignments, 2) other people, 3) hardships and 4) other events (68). McCall emphasises, that there is no such thing as a generic development path, however, meaning that many different experiences can be useful. Development, therefore, is about a rational use of experience (81).McCall holds that executive development should be determined by business strategy: the business strategy has to suggest which experiences are the most important for development (108). He points out that there are already processes at work, that have to be identified first. He than uses a case study (99) to descr

Morgan McCall is a professor of management and organization at University of Southern California and he was previously one of the guiding forces behind the Center for Creative Leadership. He has written an important book about how executives actually develop. McCall offers what he calls a "prescriptive model for developing executive talent" that includes five elements: Business Strategy, wherein top management endorses a top-down commitment to a specific approach to executive development, tied to the organization's business goals; Experience, where a melange of existing rotational assignment possibilities, coaching, corporate education and "target experiences" are employed to develop executives; Talent, which includes executive assessment processes and performance management tools to foster accountability; Mechanisms for Movement, encompassing formal succession planning processes, identifying and tracking developmental assignments through a centralized corporate executive development function and ensuring that performance management is developmentally-focused; and finally Catalysts, which include accountability by line managers, human resources and the executives themselves. This is an ambitious book, with much wisdom and guidance for those who want to obtain a comprehensive view on how executive development has been conducted up to the present time. We might quibble with McCall's relative neglect of the organizational barriers that result in a dearth of effective executive development programs in companies. He also ignores the concept of executive community. But these are minor blemishes, after all is said and done. This is a book to be treasured.