You’re describing a solid, specific system for talent development, one that, in one form or another, typically receives more verbal support from practicing managers than actual application.

Teachers/consultants need to keep up the pressure on the systematic confrontation of this issue. Your insistence that a junior have both a formal coach and mentor in his or her reporting senior and that person’s reporting senior is an interesting approach.

Allow me to note that my reference to a manager training his or her replacement is meant to highlight the import of the general talent-development responsibilities of any manager, rather than narrow them, certainly, to that single purpose. I will add, however, that I do believe that is a central duty of any manager. Having a reporting senior train your juniors to be prepared to replace you may be upsetting to important organizational dynamics, as opposed to straightforward mentoring. Indeed, mentoring by a manager-once-removed, or even one in the junior’s reporting chain, could be problemattic.

But the programmatic sense of your proposal is still attractive – it’s a main reason I think it is so interesting. It promises a functional way of institutionalizing a robust coaching/mentoring system into the managerial chain of relationships, and it does this in a way that argues for your chain-of-command proposal. A system of incentives to drive it is next. This bears further discussion of the possible difficulties to its implementation that I’ve speculated about, above.

I see your points – it’s a lot to think about – thanks!

Nice post. Yes, I agree with you here. Most organizations have little in the way of explicitly spelling out accountabilities in the managerial leadership realm. Most job descriptions of managers address the “technical” part of their job, e.g. client account management or product quality control, but precious little to none is spells out managerial leadership accountabilities.

It’s a shame because managerial leadership system design can help ameliorate some of the talent grooming issues you’ve brought up here.

First, I recommend that organizations have a leadership framework that spells their leadership principles and practices.

Within that framework I suggest two-level accountability regarding talent development. The manager is accountable to coach, i.e. bring their team’s current potential capability up to their current applied capability via feedback, training opportunities, stretch job assignments.

Then, the manager-once-removed should be accountable for mentoring, i.e. the longer term development and career planning for his talent pool two levels down.

When the accountabilities are set up in this manner, the manager is judged on how well his employees are performing in their current roles. The manager once removed is judged via pipeline development two levels down.

So rather than managers developing their replacements, managers-once-removed are developing a talent pool that will eventually work for them.

Two sets of eyes are accountable to be upon all employees. This builds extra fairness into the system because high potentials can often get mistreated/overlooked/sabotaged by a threatened manager. It is the manager-once-removed accountability to spot that and “rescue” an organization’s high potentials who are often shoved out the door by their current managers.

Regards,

Michelle Malay Carter