Leadership is a scarce resource.
Most people, it's hard to even say in two words what "leadership" really is. What is leadership? How much leadership is enough to be a leader? How can I improve my leadership?
Yang Zhuang, a professor of management at the National Development Research Institute of Peking University, believes that "leadership is the temperament of the workplace itself, and leadership is the right given by the outside world. ”
The author of Leadership Echelon: Building a Leadership-Driven Company Across the Board, Ram Charan, is a globally renowned management consulting guru, best-selling author, known as the "Contemporary Drucker", who has provided perennial management consulting services to global businesses and their leaders for the past 35 years
What is leadership? This book gives a model that can help you get a very visual understanding of leadership and examine the leadership of yourself and others in the company.
The content of the book mainly has four parts: what is the leadership echelon model; what aspects need to be transformed after the leader is promoted; what are the roles of the leadership echelon model; and what problems need to be paid attention to when using the leadership echelon model.
6 leadership stages
Let's start with the first part, what is the leadership echelon model?
Based on GE's century-old practice, Ram Charan divides the leadership echelon into 6 stages - in large companies, the growth path of an ordinary employee is: front-line employees, supervisors, department directors, business unit deputy general managers, business unit general managers, group executives, and CEOs, which covers the complete path of workplace development.
Why is it so divided? The basis is that the requirements of the position are different, and the things that employees need to manage and be responsible for are different.
Let's take a look at it one by one. Moving from front-line employee to supervisor is the first and most important step in leadership promotion. Employees' skills need to change from managing themselves to managing others. The manager made the first adjustment to the original way of working, from doing things by themselves to leading the team to do things. Many people at this stage, it takes 1 year to convert smoothly.
The second step, from supervisor to director, sounds like it can be crossed naturally, but it is very wrong. The biggest difference between this stage and the first stage is that from this stage onwards, managers need to do pure management work.
The third step, from the director to the deputy general manager of the business unit, sounds very similar, but in fact, there are significant differences. At this stage, first, managers need to manage work outside of their own profession, second, they need to take into account the needs and interests of multiple departments, and third, they need to learn to communicate across two levels downwards.
The fourth step, from the deputy general manager of the business unit to the general manager of the business unit, is another huge career challenge. In this role, managers need to take full responsibility for a business unit, which will no longer evaluate plans and proposals from the perspective of the department, but from the perspective of profitability and long-term development. Note that at this time, managers need to balance long-term goals with short-term goals and strike the right balance.
The fifth step, from the general manager of the business unit to the group executives, at this stage, sharing the responsibilities of the CEO, the requirements for the managers are very close to the requirements of the CEO, some small companies, there is no stage of development, the CEO assumes all the management responsibilities of the company.
The sixth step, from the group executives to the CEO, after the growth of the first few steps, the manager's management skills have matured, the requirements for managers at this stage are mainly in the business philosophy, must have the perspective of attaching importance to external relations, must be a thinker with great ambitions, and be good at establishing the company's operating mechanism.
Every change in leadership roles is not an easy task. Ram Charan believes that the leadership echelon is not a straight pipe, but a curve with six 90-degree turns. At every turn, you should slow down, think, learn, and progress.
3 aspects of transformation
Now we understand the 6 stages of the leadership echelon, and we have also preliminarily understood the job requirements of the 6 stages of development. Next, let's analyze what specific requirements managers face when facing a leadership transition.
Ram Charan believes that every promotion of a leader requires a transformation in three areas: leadership skills, time management, and work philosophy.
Why these three aspects?
Leadership skills refer to the new abilities required by managers to be competent for new positions; time management refers to the need for managers to reconfigure time resources to decide how to work efficiently; work philosophy refers to managers who need to update their work philosophy and values to focus their work.
Next, let's take a look at the requirements of leadership skills, time management, and work philosophy, and how to progress in the transformation of different leadership stages.
Managers' leadership skills, in general, are as follows: making plans, job design, personnel selection, authorization, performance supervision, coaching and feedback, performance evaluation, rewards and incentives, communication and creating a working atmosphere, establishing good relationships for the development of the department, and obtaining resources.
Among the above skills, the key skills that junior managers, supervisors, need to master are mainly three: one is to define and assign work, the other is to improve the competence of subordinates, and the third is to build interpersonal relationships.
What should a department director do?
He needs to select and train capable front-line managers, make front-line managers responsible for management work, allocate various resources in various departments, and effectively coordinate departmental work. These 4 leadership skills are essential for the director position.
To become a mature deputy general manager of the business unit, the most important leadership skills are to have strategic thinking and the overall situation.
When it comes to the general manager of the business unit, it is necessary to learn a tool called the "collaborative triangle model", starting from the three aspects of strategic direction, personnel ability, and organizational ability, formulating work plans and actions, and dealing with complex work.
Group executives and CEOs, in terms of leadership skills, face five challenges, one is to balance short-term and long-term interests; the second is to set the company's development direction; the third is to cultivate the company's soft power; the fourth is to implement in place; and the fifth is to manage the company in the context of globalization.
Let's move on to time management.
It is generally believed that managers spend 80% of their time on communication-related matters, and the most successful group executives spend 50% or more of their time coaching and developing talent.
The allocation of time is a concrete embodiment of values. Jobs, for example, met with people in the R&D department almost every Monday morning.
Time management for the average employee includes two aspects: commuting to and from work on time, observing attendance and completing work tasks on time. For managers, the scope of time management is infinitely magnified. This includes annual time schedules, limited sequencing of time for team work, dedicated time to communicate with subordinates, time to communicate with other departments (as well as suppliers and customers), etc.
This is especially uncomfortable for managers who are new to management positions, because they are accustomed to spending their time "doing things" rather than spending time communicating with people, which will lead to sloppy work arrangements due to lack of sufficient information.
As leadership levels rise, listening will become one of the characteristics of mature leaders, who will need to invest more time in listening and less time on general matters.
Let's look at the shift in the philosophy of work.
In the industry, there is a saying that goes like this – what is management? Management is about taking results from other people. Leadership, on the other hand, is the knowledge of accomplishing tasks through others.
These two sentences vividly explain the two basic elements of the change of managers' work philosophy: one is to take the results indirectly and complete the task through others; the other is indirect success, through the success of subordinates.
In 6 leadership phases, the CEO needs to be mentioned in particular. When managers become CEOs, they face a major shift in their work philosophy.
First, the CEO must hold his breath to achieve his long-term goals, and on the other hand, he must strive to chase the results of each quarter, find a balance between the long and short term, and execute effectively, which is the key to the success of the CEO.
Second, CEOs need to learn how to listen to the board. This is a challenge for people who are used to taking control of their own business situations.
Third, good CEOs need to be good at asking questions and listening to a wide variety of people.
The role of the leadership echelon model
In the previous introduction, we mentioned that one of the highlights of the management echelon model is "practical". So, how exactly is it a practical method? Let's analyze this problem from the perspective of individuals and companies.
Personally, we often hear people in the workplace ask the question: What should I do if I want to be promoted? If I get promoted, how do I get the job done? How can I help my subordinates after I get promoted?
The leadership echelon model answered these three questions separately.
If you want to be promoted, what should you do? According to the leadership echelon model, you need to establish your position, clarify the next goal, understand what kind of ability is needed in the next stage, and prepare in advance.
If you get promoted, how do you get the job done? The leadership echelon model clearly indicates what competencies are required at each stage. Compared with this set of tools, you can eliminate your own thinking blind spots and gradually become a mature manager.
How can you help your subordinates after you get promoted? Interventions are necessary to address barriers to leadership development. Bosses need to take some level of action to accelerate the transition of a new manager, including coaching and feedback, organizing subordinates to exchange leadership skills, organizing meetings, readings, and travel to solve problems encountered by subordinates, and making work adjustments for people who are not prepared or have essentially no leadership potential.
For companies, the leadership echelon has three roles.
First, companies can check whether their leadership echelon construction is reasonable against the leadership echelon model. In the cultivation of talents, do you feel that you can't start? Is there a mismatch between people and jobs? Are there too many leadership positions and not enough leadership? Ram Charan believes that perhaps the greatest value of the leadership echelon model is that it provides a framework on which companies can build new organizational structures, or they can use this framework as a guide to adjust established organizational structures.
Second, implement a succession plan and enrich the leadership echelon. There are many companies that often encounter talent crises, so they have to turn to headhunting companies to find "airborne soldiers". In GE's more than 100 years of development, 9 CEOs have been cultivated internally, and it can even be said that the construction of the leadership echelon is the whole secret of the evergreen foundation of the world's most respected enterprise.
When the importance of the leadership echelon is recognized, there are 5 dedicated steps to facilitate the implementation of the succession plan.
The first step is to adapt the leadership echelon model to suit the succession needs of the organization; the second step is to explain the performance and potential criteria in words that are appropriate for the company; the third step is to publicize and discuss these criteria within the organization; the fourth step is to evaluate the succession candidates with the potential-performance combination matrix; and the fifth step is to regularly and carefully review the succession planning and implementation progress of the entire leadership echelon.
3 issues to be aware of
Ramcharan pointed out that using the leadership echelon model, there are some problems that need attention. That is to say, in the actual leadership echelon model operation, there are often many pitfalls.
The first pit is called "dealing with low-level things." That is to say, the CEO does the work of the general manager, the general manager does the work of the director, the director does the work of the supervisor, the supervisor does the work of the grass-roots employees, and the grass-roots employees have to do the work of the CEO, saying that "there is a problem with the management and strategy of our company."
This problem is very frequent, and managers who have just been promoted often continue the way of doing things at the previous level, on the one hand, ignoring the things that should be paid more attention to; on the other hand, competing with subordinates, resulting in subordinates having no room for growth.
This pit also has a mirror pit called "pulling seedlings to promote growth", that is, "soldiers are used as platoon leaders, platoon leaders are used as company commanders, and company commanders are used as regimental commanders", and this phenomenon abounds in high-growth enterprises.
The second pit is called "choosing the wrong talent." To avoid selecting the wrong talent, two things need to be remembered: first, the overall requirements of the two adjacent levels may be similar, but there are significant differences in specific leadership skills, time management skills and work concepts; and second, the achievement at one level should not be the main reason for selecting someone for a higher level position.
One of the associated pits of this pit is called "keeping underperformers in their posts for too long." This problem is also common among companies.
The third pit is called "mechanical copying." Every company has its own characteristics and may have at least one leadership phase that is different. Different companies have different scales and different stages of development, all have different characteristics of the leadership echelon, and when a small company gradually grows, it will also produce different management levels. The leadership echelon model needs to be further developed to match the size of the company.
The number of leadership echelon stages varies from company to company. Some companies have six stages, some have seven stages, and some have four stages, but the basic idea of the leadership echelon model is consistent.
epilogue
Businesses are like an airplane, powered by three engines: market-driven, innovation-driven, and leadership-driven.
In the past 40 years, the development of most Chinese enterprises has mainly relied on the first engine - market demand to drive growth, but in the future new normal environment, enterprises need to pay more attention to the latter two driving engines, driven by exogenous market demand, to endogenous innovation and leadership driven, to maximize the stimulation of the fighting spirit and creativity of all employees.