Experience: The Best Teacher?

With retirement on the horizon, William was fully aware that selection of the individual who would succeed him as CEO was of vital importance to the company. To this end, he had begun a process which he believed would prepare the best potential candidate for elevation to the position. A year earlier, he had promoted Frank, his best and brightest executive, from CFO to the role of vice president of North American operations. His hope was that after two or three years with this responsibility Frank would be ready to become senior vice president of global operations and eventually his successor as CEO.

As CFO, Frank had shown excellent leadership abilities, a strategic mindset and a thorough understanding of both the business and the competitive landscape. William knew Frank lacked experience dealing directly with customers, but presupposed that in the VP of operations role, he would receive enough exposure to teach him the skill sets required. After intensive briefing sessions with customerfacing managers for background information, meetings were arranged with all of the company's top clients.

Soon after Frank started in his new position, it became obvious that the competition was making inroads on the company's customer base. Sales and profits fell as defections continued throughout the year. When questioned, clients indicated that Frank was not responsive to their changing needs despite repeated attempts to communicate them. In an attempt to salvage the situation, William arranged for Frank to attend an executive education program on customer intimacy. However, continued negative feedback indicated that his behavior had not changed to the satisfaction of the clients. After 18 months of declining sales, William was forced to terminate his former protege. The company had not only lost key customers, but also someone who was an excellent CFO. In addition, it was now without a clear internal candidate to succeed the current CEO.

Development of the next generation of leaders is one of the CEO's most critical responsibilities. As talent pools shrink with the accelerating retirement of the Baby Boomer generation, the preparation of candidates for the top levels of management will be even more imperative. One method available to the CEO to increase the proficiency of any high potential executive is providing custom-designed developmental assignments or job rotations. However, as outlined in the example above, when not properly planned and executed, the experience can fail to transfer the hoped for skills and behaviors.

Why didn't Frank's perspectives and behaviors change after prolonged interaction with the company's customers? What made the learning process less than successful? It may surprise you to learn that disappointing results from on-the-job development experiences are quite common. As an example, the expatriate experience, in which an executive is sent to another country to run a business unit for a predetermined period of time, has a notoriously high rate of failure. Other examples of ineffective efforts can be pulled from current headlines.

Yet, despite this documentation, research clearly shows that when successful executives are asked to recall their most valuable learning activity, the vast majority of responses describe a challenging on-thejob assignment. This would indicate that experience is one of the most powerful developmental vehicles. Then why is it that knowledgeable executives are still promoted into senior level positions lacking some of the critical skills they need to execute their jobs successfully? Why are so many companies concerned about the lack of adequate candidates in their leadership pipeline? Why aren't enough executives learning what they need to know on their jobs to take a place on the executive bench? These are questions the perceptive CEO must consider to ensure that the developmental assignments his or her executives are undertaking will deliver the desired outcomes.

Initially, the answer would appear simple. If a person does not grow professionally from a developmental experience, then either it is not the right experience, and/or the individual doesn't know how to benefit from the exercise. The solution, however, is more complex.

Finding the Right Experiences
How do you go about crafting a developmental experience that will benefit the executive being targeted? There are two major factors to consider. First, the experience should be driven by the competence gaps an executive has with respect to the company's strategic goals. For example, having risen through the finance function, Frank had little operational background and never had a customer-facing job. William correctly tried to structure developmental experiences to help him gain the skills and behaviors he needed to support the company's customer intimacy strategy. While ideally Frank would have acquired some of these abilities earlier in his career, William was trying to overcome his narrow career path.

However, was enough care taken to isolate the fundamental behavior which constituted the critical gap and therefore required modification? A review of Frank's performance evaluations would reveal that even as CFO he often received feedback that he did not listen carefully to others. Since he was considered an excellent CFO, this deficit was never perceived as a major hindrance to his performance. Nonetheless, if an objective third party had complied a ranking of crucial competencies required for Frank's new position, listening to customers would have been high on the list.

It should have become clear when customers starting leaving after complaining about his poor listening ability that Frank needed help in the area of communication. A workshop on customer intimacy may have mentioned the need to listen to customers, but it wouldn't have taught him how to do so. A better course of action would have been to design the initial experience to focus on the specific skills and conduct needed to be successful. To do this properly would have required a deeper understanding of Frank's shortcomings in order to correctly identify his true deficits. This may sound obvious, but many companies do not take the time to make sure their executives will be exposed to experiences that focus on the essential behavioral change required for growth.