Pipelines will get choked. When water pipelines develop a block, the inconvenience is significant. Choked gas pipelines can be debilitating too. However, in the urban milieu, pipelines cannot be wished away. Most of us know it. What water and gas pipelines are to households, leadership pipelines are to corporates. It’s challenging to ‘construct’ and ‘maintain’ a leadership pipeline, but it is absolutely essential.
“There is fair level of agreement that growing leaders from within is the only sustainable solution. While hiring leaders from outside maybe necessary for practical reasons, the ability of most organisations to assimilate them is often a challenge. Therefore, when we talk about building a leadership pipeline, we are talking about the ability of the organisation to grow from within or create their own leaders,” says Ganesh Chella, vice-chairman and managing director, Coaching Foundation India Limited.
How to create a leadership pipeline?
To create one, an organisation should be geared towards promoting leadership across the spectrum. Ganesh differentiates between leadership as a position and leadership as an act.
“The act of leadership can be demonstrated by anybody. Even the junior-most staff can demonstrate acts of leadership through expertise in their spheres of activity. Acts of leadership have to be encouraged at all levels. The term ‘leader’ does not refer to the CEO alone. Leaders are required at every level. In fact, the earlier an organisation commences this process, the stronger it is likely to be,” says Ganesh. To be able to create a culture of leadership, an organisation has to adopt a broader and customised definition of leadership.
“It is important that leadership is defined keeping in mind every organisation’s unique context. It is important that we do not try to follow a textbook’s model of leadership or over-engineer our definitions of whom we consider a leader or what we expect from a leader. For example, functional leaderships are as valuable as profit centre leadership, technical expertise is as important as people management. In trying to have one universally appealing framework, we should not shut the doors on people who might potentially provide leadership,” says Ganesh. Managers have to be chosen wisely, for they play a crucial role in creating a culture of leadership.
“Creating a leadership pipeline starts with the simple act of delegation. Insecurity on the part of managers may prevent them from delegating work,” says R. Sridhar, an innovation coach.
By seeking to ‘grow’ the people behind the processes, leader-managers contrast with managers. While appointing managers, an organisation should choose those who are not only adept at executing the process, but have also built mentoring into their style of functioning.
Leader-managers not only delegate work, but also empower subordinates. They trust their team members enough to allow them to take independent decisions in areas under their watch. They are aware that nobody is really ready for a leadership role until he is invited to play it. A leader-manager can be compared to the eagle that forces its young to start flying.
“One of the enablers of a free-flowing leadership pipeline is the faith in people and the ability to place bets on them. Organisations which tend to expect everyone to be 100% ready before giving them a break will smother them and allow them to choke the pipeline,” says Ganesh. Agile transformation, which is being increasingly practised in organisations, relies on “self-organising and self-managing teams.” To create such teams is to create a leadership pipeline.
“A great leader is someone who can run an enterprise even in his absence. Generally, one of the success criteria for any leader is his/her ability to create the next-level person who can champion the cause in his/her absence. If you take a role of a scrum master (the facilitator for an Agile development team), he/she is said to be an effective scrum master if he/she makes him/herself redundant and anyone else within the team is capable of carrying out the role as time progresses. This is part of the maturity continuum for a scrum master, and this works at the leadership level too,” says Mahesh Varadharajan, senior Agile consultant, SoutionsIQ India Consulting Services.
Does creating a leadership pipeline means shutting the door on external hiring? “It is important to have an open mind about external talent. Sometimes, an external talent is like a stent which needs to be implanted to release a block. To be totally against external hiring is wrong. However, to value external hires more than internal candidates is also a challenge. Sometimes, an organisation must be honest to accept that for a given need, it does not have the right people and just because it must grow leaders from within, it should not compromise. That flexibility must be there and the right person should be chosen for the role. However, an organisation cannot underestimate the effort and resource required to source a candidate from outside,” says Ganesh.
The culture of certain organisations may prevent them from growing leadership at all levels; how can this be tackled?
One, identifying and appointing leader-managers to positions of authority and two, empowering them to introduce behaviours and habits that would replace those that prevent the creation of a leadership pipeline.
Says Mahesh, “Organisation culture will not change on day one of intervention. It does not change by fighting what is wrong with it. Instead of unlearning or trying to change old habits, focus on creating new habits. You start small — you introduce new habits or behaviours in the enterprise and, if people like it, start expanding the scale more and more. Over time, the new habits will become the new normal.”
