If you’re an aspiring leader, this episode is for you.
, a leadership professor at Claremont McKenna College, notes that many organizations quietly maintain and update lists of high-potential employees.
One of the senior executives or someone from HR would tell you that you’ve been assigned to executive training. They’d send you off for three months. JAY CONGER: Well, given the fact that half the companies we studied don’t tell you, that’s a very important question. The way you would tell if you’re designated is you’ll notice you’ll be invited to events that most of your peers are not invited to. So, you might be asked to have lunch with your Executive Vice President or CEO. You’ll notice you got assigned to a very special, high visibility project which ultimately ends in a presentation to an executive group.
JAY CONGER: So, they then have a meeting in which the boss will bring into the meeting room and again, if it’s a more junior in the organization, he or she might have two names. As you get more senior, the boss might have five names. And as you become an executive you might bring in 20, 10 or 20 names to your CEO. There’s then a discussion, a really in-depth discussion about each person and the question is, is this person ready to be moved two roles up? And it’s a very thoughtful discussion.
JAY CONGER: I think there are a couple reasons why that happens and then I would share what you should do. I think some of these organizations, the systems are way too rigid. Secondly, if you think about it the manager really is the focal point. They’re the decision maker. And if you were pinned to a manager for four, five, six years who basically had different, unrealistic expectations, very different chemistry from your, you could see that you would not get designated.
JAY CONGER: You can ask it. They may or may not tell you. And sometimes if you’re thinking of leaving, but you feel you have hints that you might be a high potential person, and you think you’d prefer to stay, but you’re uncertain, it’s the type of thing where you could ask potentially your boss or you could go to Human Resources. Again, it will depend upon how confidential they feel the process is.
JAY CONGER: So, I’ll start with what we call the first X-factor which is situations, sensing and that’s the boss. And reading your boss and as you move up that’s going to be reading your boss’s boss and your boss’s, boss’s boss and your boss’s peers, so.
JAY CONGER: That’s right. And so you have to be very comfortable and then a very quick learner which is kind of our foundational X-factor that we call catalytic learning which is you have a fundamental curiosity that leads you to ask questions, to be an investigator when you step into roles. And then to turn those insights into initiatives and that’s the catalytic part. It’s one thing to be a good learner, but if you’re not translating into activities it doesn’t work.
JAY CONGER: So, this actually was one of our kind of most surprising findings. And I just kept seeing it in the interviews over and over and over. People would say, “Peng” is so good at taking all the information around us and making sense of it for us. And I started to realize that it’s this ability to take all the complexity that a team is facing or an enterprise is facing and boil it down to the essential points.
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