Developing a Leadership Pipeline

Envisage a company that has a chief financial officer but does not have a general ledger, a budget process, a cost accounting system, and a capital allocation process that are tied together. That financial officer would not have much success. A finance architecture enables the entire organization to work with and talk about financial matters in a consistent way.

Companies need an enduring architecture to focus human resource processes and programs. The architecture should set common standards for both performance and potential, differentiated by layer of management. It should also establish language and processes to address issues, identify problems, and exploit opportunities effectively, as well as data for making decisions about everything from job transition to performance improvement.

The above is elaborated further in The Leadership Pipeline book. Today, a significant number of Fortune 500 companies have implemented the Leadership Pipeline model as their key architecture for selecting, assessing, and developing leaders. Learn more about how we can help build a leadership development roadmap for your organization.

Value Proposition

The impact of working with us implementing the Leadership Pipeline principles will be significant. Not just for the leaders in question but for the entire organization. Below, we have listed examples of how working with the Leadership Pipeline principles will help your organization in various ways.

Organizational

• Provides a strategic, systemic approach to development and assessment of leaders

• Enables reliable strategic, tactical and operational succession planning

• Drives accountability for delivering results and developing leadership talent

• Improves the execution power of your company by building a leadership powered culture saturated by accountability and leaders leading at the right level

People Managers

• Helps clarify and align performance expectations for the leadership role

• Enables on-job, leader-led development of leaders

• Makes selection and de-selection more objective by identifying matches and mismatches between individuals’ capabilities and their leadership role

Professionals

• Helps the professionals making an informed decision about whether the leadership career is right path for him or her to pursue

• Provides a transparent framework for what performance they can and should expect from their direct managers

Leadership First Principles

The Leadership Pipeline offers first principles for mapping and building an efficient and agile leadership architecture, infrastructure and operation model. This will help you:

• Grow leaders across the organization

• Create leadership agility

• Improve execution power

• Increase organizational efficiency

This is done by defining the critical transitions in terms of work values, time application and skills that leaders are faced with when moving from one leadership role to another. You can also use the Leadership Pipeline principles to define the expected performance standards for each leadership role in the organization.

How We Work With Organizations

There are different approaches to implementing the Leadership Pipeline principles. Also, different organizations have different sweet spots for starting the implementation. We work with your organization on your terms and we start where it is most important for you to start.

The scope of our role depends on what you are in need of and what internal resources you have in place for the project. Our contribution would most often focus on:

• Mapping core leadership roles

• Define performance standards for different leadership roles

• Define work values, time application and skills for different leadership roles

• Designing and delivering leadership transition programs for the core leadership roles

• Design and implement a succession planning process

Most companies start with one or two of the above listed initiatives. The extent of our involvement in each area varies from assignment to assignment.

Learn more about the leadership and specialist transition programs and succession planning.

You Might Also Be Interested In