Transferable Incompetence?

Have you ever wondered why CEOs are able to hop so easily from one company to another?  If you were brought up on McClelland, Boyatzis, Schroder et al, you'll smugly reply that it's because they have developed strengths in a number of transferable management competencies - and to some extent, you'd be right.  But has it ever occurred to you that that can only really work if the environments are roughly similar - not necessarily the economic, technical or business environments, but the management environment  needs to be roughly the same.  CEOs can job swap with ease because, broadly speaking, the levers of management, the arrangement of units and divisions, the dials on the management dashboard are the same in most companies.  Now, you might think that is a product of evolution, and the rules dictate what you can and can't do so that everyone operates within the same limits in their quest for perfection.  But that can't be right, because many of today's most successful businesses are the ones that are doing things differently. 

At least some of them are embracing:

• Leadership that sees its chief objective as developing the ability of others, rather than controlling what other people do or just hanging on to power
• Integrative thinking that goes beyond traditional trade-offs and creates solutions that pay off for all stakeholder groups
• Small self-governing units or teams with the wherewithal and access to resources to enable them to make a difference

What is everyone else doing?  Well very possibly atrophying, certainly management seems to have stopped evolving.  Peter Capelli wrote a very interesting piece in the March 2008 Harvard Business Review pointing out that virtually all of the processes currently used in large corporations for Talent Management date back fifty years.  Which means they were designed in, and for, stable, cradle-to-grave job environments .  But hang on a moment,  does that apply to most of the management practices you are using?  Do the ghosts of the gurus of bygone days still stroll your corridors of power?

How about taking an honest look at how your organisation develops people - and what the development experts you choose to assist you are actually teaching? How about putting programmes in place to teach Conceptual Flexibility and Integrative Thinking?  (See the article The Opposable Mind elsewhere in this newsletter).

Or how about changing your funding model to mirror that of the Grameen Bank?  Based on the belief that the poor are poor because they lack access to capital, and with a mission to extend credit to the severely impoverished, the bank now has over 2,000 branches, over 6 million borrowers, mostly in small syndicates with no collateral and precious little paperwork, and a loan recovery rate better than 98%.  Oh, and no exposure to the US sub-prime mortgage market.  If it is possible to run a bank in Bangladesh this way couldn't your organisation be making small simple loans available to groups of managers with bright ideas for a system improvement, or a product improvement without cumbersome annual budget procedures?  You might of course need to develop people's financial acumen and commercial awareness, but that is only a phone call away - our team of financial delivery experts would love to hear from you!

Or how about having all management appointees approved by the people they are going to manage - just like they do at Semco, Ricardo Semler's topsy-turvy employee-powered engineering to logistics company?  Or allowing open-access blogs with complete anonymity and all comments published.  After all your people will air your dirty washing somewhere on the web.  Why not be the first to find out about it - and then act on it?

In fact how about having Learning and Development lead the way into a new future for management - creating businesses fit for purpose in the twenty-first century, organisations aligned to the age of the Digital Native, and global tribes of individuals utilising all their imagination and creativity, bound together more by social networks than company rule books to achieve objectives they truly value and believe in? 

Now, there's an idea..­.