Page 110 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

100 HBR Leader’s Handbook

a SWOT-style analysis on their own organization. Over the course
of several months, they identified a number of strategic initiatives
and financial shifts and took responsibility for getting them orga-
nized and carried out. In addition to the institutional results, the
effort helped the leaders develop new skills and perspectives. One
eventually became the interim president, and another became the
chief operating officer—roles that they would never have been able
to handle without this experience.

• Moving people into stretch assignments. You and your HR
partner can set this up in a number of ways, such as through
project-based training or special projects. In project-based train-
ing, high-potential leaders from different areas are given a specific
project to achieve over a two- to three-month period (while con-
tinuing their regular jobs) and learn skills needed to accomplish
the project through focused workshops, webinars, or work with
a leadership coach. Siemens, for example, used this approach for
many years to not only accomplish substantial results (such as
introducing products into new countries), but also to develop hun-
dreds of next-generation leaders. And if your organization doesn’t
offer training like this, you can take the initiative by giving your
people special projects on your own and support their learning
with online, university-based, or consulting inputs. For example,
the head of a marketing team challenged one of her high poten-
tials to organize a new recruiting process for the team and sent
him to a university program on human capital to get some fresh
perspectives.

• Creating job rotations. Another approach is to rotate your people
through different parts of the company so that they have hands-on
experience with a variety of business challenges, cultures, and
geographies. International Paper, for example, moves its high-
potential leaders across units and geographies to give them a
broader perspective on the company and to see how they perform
under different conditions. If your company doesn’t do this rou-