Managing Leadership^®

The apprenticeship model of management - or leadership - development is a deeply perceptive approach to this vital topic that is most effectively championed by Wally Bock, of Three Star Leadership. The basic premise is that leadership cannot be learned in school, but must be practiced on the job. The wise organization will provide mechanisms - from career path assignments to mentoring programs - to facilitate this.

That single insight by itself can save organizations a tremendous amount of aggravation in infusing truly effective and robust talent development systems into their structures. And it need not start only at the entry level for management - but in the staff, as we discussed on Friday.

In a comment to that post, Gannon Beck offered a terrific example of how this idea worked for him as a perhaps unanticipated, but highly effective management development program:

I’m convinced that even the most complex job can have a piece of it broken off so that someone can be hired to do it with little or no training. In my business, that’s the job of coloring designs for T-shirts. Even though it would take years to develop the ability to illustrate T-shirts at our level, we can train a candidate to color designs in a few weeks.

The criteria for this position shifts away from skill sets, to merely a desire to do the work. Enthusiasm for the job seems to be the key indicator for success.

One candidate showed up who never used any of the software we use, didn’t own a computer, never worked in screen printing, and never even took a single art class. He wanted to do the job so badly, though, that he kept showing up even when we didn’t have a position. He kept expressing how much he wanted to work in the company.

He was hired on a part-time trial basis and has worked his tail off to become as skilled as possible. He is now an expert with the software and has a better command of this industry than any of the college students and graduates I’ve interviewed in the last two years.

If I’m out of the office, I know I can rest easy because he is capable of handling almost any situation that may arise while I’m away. He does not do entry-level work anymore, but without creating an entry-level position, I would have missed out on him.”

Undeterred by the absence of traditional credentials, Gannon was alert to the promise indicated by the persistent desire and enthusiasm displayed by this candidate. He designed a low-risk, containable and controllable program to see how far the employee could go.

Do your managers do that? Do you? And, how about your hirees - how are they coming along?

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Today’s Tip: Speaking of failing to look far enough for true indicators of success, how about not looking far enough for the true sources of failure? Please view and carefully consider the implications of this piece by Michael Wade, of Execupundit.

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