Monday, September 12, 2011

Great leaders make great leaders

In the world of leadership development, The Big Question has always been, “Are leaders born or made?”  Personally, I think this question gets far too much weight.  Even the most “natural” leaders spend a lifetime learning their craft.  You’d be crazy to move someone from individual contributor to running a division. Too much goes into getting ready for that level of responsibility, or, for that matter, for any level of management responsibility. 

Why? Because management isn’t just more scope, it’s an entirely different job. The heavy lifting in leadership roles demands market intuition, deep competence in managing resources, highly developed emotional intelligence, cross-boundary collaboration, a sense for how long or hard a team can be pushed before coming apartcoach at the seams – in short, a host of complex skills and knowledge that comes only through learning and experience. And with each successive level of leadership, it gets tougher and more ambiguous.

So the real Big Question is, “How do we get leaders ready for the next level of responsibility?  There’s a small industry out there just dying to answer that question for you.  There are competency frameworks that lay out differing skills and knowledge for each level of management, leadership development program models that involve everything from structured learning to coaching and action learning projects, assessments to gauge strengths and weaknesses for moving to the next level – plenty of tools in the leadership development toolkit.  But for all that structure, the real answer comes down to this: Great leaders are developed by great leaders.

Throughout history, the greats in every field were the protégés of someone.  Lance Armstrong had Eddy Merckx to mentor him.  Anthony Hopkins had Laurence Olivier.  Alexander the Great had Aristotle.  Oliver Stone had Martin Scorcese, and Martin Scorcese had Roger Corman (as did Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, James Cameron and Jonathan Demme, among others).

As organizations have grown in size and complexity, we in the world of leadership development have attempted to systematize these professionally intimate  “master/apprentice” relationships.  We create websites where mentor and mentee candidates can assign themselves to partnerships, we write instructions on what a good mentoring call might look like, and we track the volume of connections as a success metric.

But the proof is in the results.  Do the people in these partnerships get promoted more often?  Are they more effective?  Are they “great” in their roles?  Is the program changing the trajectory of the individuals or the success of the business?

If the answer is no, then the issue may be that there is no real mentoring going on. At least not the kind I’m talking about.   Mentoring should include far more than just a monthly coaching call.  It requires teaching, stretching, exposure and sponsorship – in short, investment and accountability on the part of the mentor to change the trajectory of the protégé’s career and success. 

Last year, I had the opportunity to hear Betsy Myers speak at Elliott Masie’s Learning 2010 conference on the issue of mentoring for women in organizations.  She noted that women are engaged in mentoring relationships much more often than men in the workforce, and yet women as a group are not getting the career traction they should based on merit.  The shift required in these mentoring relationships, she said, was moving from mentorship to sponsorship – where the mentor is both teacher and advocate for the protégé. 

Yes, that’s right.  Mentors should do everything to create a relatively unfair advantage for their proteges to get ahead.  Think about it.  If you as a mentor don’t think your protégé is worth pushing hard and moving up, then why are you investing your time with them?  Go find the raw talent elsewhere, and invest deeply to shape that talent.

In the end, it all comes down to the legacy you plan to leave as a leader.  With the churn in the business environment, most leaders won’t even recognize the businesses they built within a couple of years of their departure.  Which means that, as much as you hate to hear it, your stamp on the organization will be all but gone before you can shave 3 strokes off your handicap.  The real legacy you will leave, then, is the next generation of leaders you create, and the leaders those leaders will create.  Great leaders make great leaders.

So ask yourself – who is my protégé?   And who would call me their protégé? If you can’t answer those questions, you’re holding your organization back, and you’re holding yourself back.  More importantly, you’re compromising your legacy.  It’s not about your success today, it’s about the leaders you leave behind to carry on your vision.  I’d rather be a Roger Corman or an Eddy Merckx any day, knowing that I changed the direction and the lives of the people in my profession.