Manage-Wise

How apprenticeship grooms leaders

It’s hard for most people to picture a corporate executive as an apprentice, someone whom the dictionary defines as engaged in learning a skill or a craft. But the concept of apprenticeship is at the heart of this new approach to leadership development. To understand why, you will have to come to grips with a potentially controversial belief: leadership can only be developed through practice. People can pick up tools and techniques and ideas about leadership from a book or a classroom. A lot of what passes for leadership development consists of this sort of thing. But those who have a talent for leadership must develop their abilities by practicing in the real world and converting that experience into improved skill and judgement. That conversion does not take place in a classroom, and not everyone can make that conversion. I have reached this conclusion after several decades of working with leaders at all levels in all kinds of companies.

Let’s take it down to the ground level. An apprentice system doesn’t waste time trying to teach, say, a man with no mechanical abilities how to operate a complex machine tool. It starts with one who has that inherent aptitude and develops his skills over time. He may have some book and classroom training, but the art and skill that he learns working with seasoned technical people is what will someday make him a master toolmaker. Business leadership is no different. Leaders—meaning those people with the inherent aptitude of leadership—develop predominantly through experience, combined with substantive evaluation and self-correction along the way.

Apprenticeship model

The Apprenticeship Model is a rigorous system for providing experiences and feedback that are tailored to accelerate each leader’s development. It starts by identifying the people who show signs of leadership aptitude. These are the people we call high-potential leaders. The model pinpoints each leader’s specific talents and identifies some who are likely to have the highest potential—the qualities that could make some of them good CEOs down the road.

Companies using the model put leaders in jobs carefully chosen to build on their existing talents and test their ability to discover or acquire new capabilities. They also provide feedback in real time so the leaders continually improve their skills and judgment. At least once a year, their companies review the learning that has taken place and identify the learning that must come next for each leader to build his own brand of leadership. They take risks on leaders deemed to have the highest potential by putting them in jobs that are immensely more complex than the one before, giving them the practice they will need to someday make the leap to CEO.

In the Apprenticeship Model, leaders at every level not only have to develop their own leadership capabilities, they must at the same time play an essential role in identifying and developing other leaders’ talent, particularly for the people who report directly to them (their “direct reports”). This is a new way of looking at a leader’s job and will require a different mind-set and often some new skills for leaders throughout the organization.

Accelerating the development of each leader’s talent not only strengthens leadership at every level, which is important in its own right, but it also lays the foundation for a robust CEO succession process. Moving up incrementally through an organization does not prepare a leader for the scope and complexity a CEO must contend with.

Key elements of the Apprenticeship Model, then, are to define leadership potential correctly, spot it as soon as possible, then focus time and attention to help talented young leaders develop through a series of jobs customized to allow each one of them to expand as quickly as possible. Leaders at every level participate activity in growing other leaders, and leadership development becomes a key component of every leader’s job. That’s how the Apprenticeship Model transforms an organization into a self-perpetuating leadership development machine.

Identifying leadership talent

Finding leadership talent early is essential. The path from initial recruitment to the senior levels of a company is approximately twenty-five years long and involves, on average, only five jobs before becoming eligible for the CEO post. Most high-level job incumbents reach that point by the age of about fifty. The sooner potential talent is identified, the better it can be developed and tested. Finding the right talent is equally important because growing high-potential leaders is highly resource intensive. The most precious resources here are not financial but the time, energy, and attention of other leaders. These are always in short supply and must therefore be devoted to the people who are most likely to succeed at top levels.

Spotting leaders early means spotting them in their very first jobs. Leaders at lower organizational levels must learn how to identify people who have a talent for leadership, however undeveloped it is. Senior leaders must work with these lower-level leaders to ensure that the identification process is working as it should.

The essence of early identification is to find people with a natural talent to lead and, importantly, to understand business. A keen observer can usually spot that talent by the time a person is twenty-five years old and is entering the workforce. A high-potential candidate will exhibit the drive to master new skills, the ability to rapidly absorb knowledge and then communicate it, and a natural bent to build lasting relationships and mobilize others to get things done. He will be learning not only what his own job entails but what his boss’s job and his boss’s boss’s job requires. He will invariably redefine his own job, sometimes explicitly and deliberately, and in doing so may force his boss to rethink his own job as well. By definition, a high-potential person will outshine his bosses until the person reaches his full potential, and the leadership of a company needs to be aware of that dynamic. No forty-five-year-old will become the CEO of a major company unless he outshines every boss from the time he enters the company until he is nominated for the job.

Excerpt from ‘Leaders at All Levels’ by Ram Charan. Reproduced with permission © 2009, Wiley India Private Limited. Price: Rs 399.