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Enhancing Leadership Effectiveness within Organizations: Strategies for Growing High-Potential Talent

Enhancing leadership effectiveness is fast becoming a strategic imperative for many organizations. One important strategy is to focus on developing high – potential talent to help ensure an organization’s future leadership resources. This forum will offer three unique perspectives on this topic, with speakers drawn from industry, academia, and consulting:

Why Most Succession Management Programs Fail and What Organizations Need to Do to Succeed (William Byham)

Succession management involves identifying high-potential candidates for acceleration within the organization, diagnosing their development needs and effectively implementing the development plans. Most organizations with succession management plans are very unhappy with their success in these areas--particularly relative to creating meaningful growth of high potentials. Bill Byham will share the results of a worldwide study of best succession management practices. He will discuss the use of Acceleration Pools instead of traditional replacement planning, the use of a new type of assessment center to diagnose development needs, and new ideas of how to align development business objectives to make development happen.

• PDF of Presentation

Accelerating the Development of Tomorrow’s Leaders: The Care and Feeding of High-Potential Talent (Ben Dowell)

Ensuring that an organization has the leaders needed to address future market challenges may be the most important strategic action a company can take. The importance of leadership development becomes even more critical in high growth companies. In these companies the scale and complexity of the future business environment will demand leaders with qualitatively greater capacity than the leaders in comparable positions today. Developing today’s high potential talent at a rate sufficient to prepare them to meet tomorrow’s standards is the task of those creating and managing development programs for high potentials.

In this session we will describe Bristol-Myers Squibb Company’s approach to high potential talent development, the Accelerated Development Program (ADP), and the lessons we have learned. The Accelerated Development Program is designed to construct strategically-oriented individualized development plans, focusing on job experiences as the primary learning vehicle, and then maximizing the return on those experiences. The participants in the program are a globally diverse group of early career, very high potential leaders.

The core elements of the Accelerated Development Program to be discussed are:

1. Governance by a high level leadership development Steering Committee
2. An assessment of the company’s business strategy and the implications for the development required for the next generation of leaders
3. The identification of very high potential talent
4. An in-depth, multi-source assessment that serves as a foundation for the development plans
5. The creation of strategic, deterministic development plans
6. Development of tailored retention plans
7. Accelerated access to developmental work experiences, jobs, and corporate-wide assignments
8. Assignment of Development Guides (i.e., internal coaches)

• PDF of Presentation

Good News and Bad News About Developing Global Executives (Morgan McCall, Jr. co-authored with George Hollenbeck)

Drawing on interviews with 101 international executives from around the world, this session will address how using experience for development is affected by a global context. The protocol for these interviews was similar to that used several years ago in the study of domestic US executives, discussed in The Lessons of Experience. The interviews focused on experiences that shaped these executives, what was learned from those experiences, and what derails successful executives. The results suggest both good and bad news.

Retaining talent also presents some unique challenges for global corporations. While derailment is similar in some respects, both the cultural context and increased organizational mistakes make international work far more treacherous than domestic careers. Added to that are the well-documented family pressures created by international work and the problems of repatriation.

This session will conclude with some specific implications for practice on how to modify development systems to address this added complexity.

• PDF of Presentation

Ben is Vice President, Center for Leadership Development for the Bristol-Myers Squibb Company. In his current position he is responsible for leading a group which provides coaching and consulting to the senior management of the company focused on the identification, selection, and development of senior leaders in the company. He has been with Bristol-Myers Squibb since 1989 in a variety of human resource generalist and human resource development roles.

Prior to Bristol-Myers Squibb Ben held a number of management development and human resource generalist positions in various divisions of Pepsico including Frito-Lay, Pepsico Foods International and Pizza Hut. Prior to Pepsico he was Assistant Professor of Administrative Sciences in the Graduate School of Business at Kent State University and managing partner of The Kent Group, a consulting firm he co-founded. Ben received his Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from the University of Minnesota and his BA in Psychology from the University of Texas.

Morgan McCall is a Professor of Management and Organization in the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. In addition to his faculty responsibilities, he works with the Office of Executive Development in the design and delivery of executive programs, teaches in the International Business Education and Research (IBEAR) program, and is affiliated with the Center for Effective Organizations. Prior to joining USC Morgan was Director of Research and a Senior Behavioral Scientist at the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Executive leadership, especially early identification, assessment, development, and derailment of executives, is the primary focus of Morgan's research and writing. His two most recent books, Developing Global Executives: The Lessons of International Experience, co-authored with George Hollenbeck, and Advances in Global Leadership, Volume II, co-edited with William Mobley, extend his work to the international stage. Prior to these, he wrote High Flyers: Developing the Next Generation of Leaders (translated into Chinese, Japanese, Dutch, and Thai, and winner of the 1998 Athena Award for Excellence in Mentoring), and co-authored The Lessons of Experience, a book on how executives develop that won the "New Perspectives on Executive Leadership Award" and was a MacMillan Book Club and "Fast Track" selection. He also co-authored Whatever it Takes: The Realities of Managerial Decision Making, Leadership: Where Else can We Go?, and Key Events in Executives' Lives. He led the team that created Looking Glass, Inc., a simulation of managerial work widely used in corporate management development. His career contributions were honored recently when he received the Marion Gislason award for "Leadership in Executive Development" from the Executive Development Roundtable at Boston University.

An active speaker and consultant, Morgan has worked with a variety of organizations including American Express, Amgen, Boeing, Cisco Systems, Disney, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, NCR, Sun Microsystems, Toyota Motor Sales, and Weyerhaeuser. He is on the faculties of SunU and the University of Toyota. In addition to conducting workshops and seminars on executive leadership, he works with senior executives to develop corporate strategies and systems for executive development.

After receiving a B.S. with honors from Yale University, Morgan earned his Ph.D. from Cornell. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. He has served on numerous editorial boards, including the Academy of Management Review, the Academy of Management Executive, Human Resource Development Quarterly, and Executive Development Journal.

Bill co-founded Development Dimensions International with Dr. Douglas Bray in 1970. Bill works with DDI's executive Operating Committee to establish the vision, values, and strategic direction of the company, and supervises major DDI product development and consulting projects.

Bill’s major accomplishments include:

• Championing the application of the assessment center method worldwide. He wrote the first popular article on the assessment center, which appeared in the Harvard Business Review in 1970, and has been the thought leader of the methodology ever since. He published the first catalog of assessment center exercises in 1970, developed numerous categories of assessment exercises, founded the International Congress on Assessment Center Methods, and has spoken about assessment centers throughout the world. His two books on the assessment center method and more than 50 articles and papers have aided both organizations and professionals.
• Developing the first behavior-based selection system, Targeted Selection®, in 1970. To communicate the basis of his system, Bill co-authored The Selection Solution: Solving the Mystery of Matching People to Jobs, which solves one of the most vital mysteries facing any organization—identifying and matching the right person to the right job. He also authored Landing the Job You Want, which teaches effective ways to communicate information about yourself to an interviewer and how to deal with challenging interviewing situations.
• Writing the first book about the implications of Equal Employment Opportunity law and other legal constraints on personnel testing and selection, The Law and Personnel Testing. Bill has served as an expert witness in several federal court cases involving EEO issues.
• Co-developing the first commercially available behavior-modeling program, Interaction Management®, in 1975. More than 10 million people have been trained in Interaction Management.
• Developing the first assessment system based on observations of videotapes and written materials, also known as AccuRATE™, in 1982.
• Co-authoring Zapp!™The Lightning of Empowerment, a seminal book about empowerment. A business best seller since its publication in 1988, it has sold more than 4.5 million copies. Bill also has adapted the book for educators, health care professionals, and service providers. He continuously encourages employee empowerment through his writings, speeches, and programs. His best-selling business book, HeroZ™—Empower Yourself, Your Co-Workers, and Your Company, offers step-by-step techniques to show people how to make meaningful decisions, measure progress, and work effectively in teams.
• Helping to make teams and teamwork successful in organizations throughout the world, including co-authoring three books on teams (Empowered Teams, Leadership Trapeze, and Inside Teams) and helping to develop numerous DDI programs to provide skills to organizations, employees, and leaders as they move toward teams.

Before co-founding DDI, Bill was the manager of selection, appraisal, and general management development for J.C. Penney Company, Inc. He received his Doctorate in Industrial Organizational Psychology from Purdue University and his Masters and Bachelor of Science degrees from Ohio University.

Bill has received numerous awards including:

• 2000 Small Business News Pittsburgh Pacesetter, Leaders for the New Millennium
• 2000 Liberal Arts Alumni of the Year, Purdue University
• 1997 CEO Communicator of the Year: Executive Report Magazine, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
• 1996 The Bernard P. McDonough Award for Excellence in Leadership: Marietta College, Ohio
• McDonough Caperton Distinguished Lecturer, West Virginia University
• 1994 Western Pennsylvania Service Entrepreneur of the Year: Ernst & Young, Inc. Magazine, and Merrill Lynch
• 1994 Tunku Abdul Rahman Medallion: Malaysian Institute of Management
• 1994 Award for Achievement in Business: College of Business Administration, Ohio University
• 1992 Distinguished Contribution to the practice of Psychology and Management, Society of Psychologists in Management
• 1989 Professional Practice Award: Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology: American Psychological Association
• 1988 Distinguished Contribution to Human Resource Development Award: American Society For Training and Development
• 1985 Medal of Merit for "Outstanding Achievements in Management and Industrial Training," Ohio University

In addition to the above awards, Bill is also a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and holds a Diploma in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from the American Board of Professional Psychology.