Leadership Passages: The Personal and Professional Transitions That Make or Break a Leader (J-B US non-Franchise Leadership)

Some companies are astute about stretch assignments. Kraft, for instance, has become known as the “cradle of CEOs,” in part because they make a concerted effort to place their best people in jobs that stretch them just the right amount. Executives at Kraft often develop the flexibility, leadership instincts, and team management skills that are part of this passage, and as a result they make great CEO candidates. For years at GE, their Mobile Communications business served as a de facto leadership testing ground. By GE standards, it’s a small ($1 billion) business, making it a good place for leaders to be thrown into jobs for which they’re not fully prepared. We know at least two people who headed that business: John Trani, CEO of Stanley Works, who went from Mobile Communications to become CEO of GE Medical, and James McNerney, who was in the running to be CEO of GE and is now chairman and CEO of 3M. For both of these strong leaders, the early stretch assignment of running a smaller business unit, taking a multifunctional perspective, growing revenue and profitability, balancing growth and execution, people and tasks—trained them for increasing responsibility and subsequent success.

Although not every organization has the resources of GE or Kraft, every company can maximize the learning potential of this stretch passage by doing the following:

• Make sure a stretch assignment really causes an individual to stretch. A challenging assignment for one person isn’t so challenging for another. A job that merely requires someone to work harder and faster isn’t necessarily a stretch. Nor is a task that demands a little more knowledge but not a lot. We counsel executives that in succession planning and in selecting leaders for new roles, they need to evaluate a stretch, based on the individual and her particular set of knowledge, skills, and values. They need to make these assignments based on their understanding of this person and how she needs to develop. For development, stretch requires moving into the unknown, and this requires a significant amount of trust on the part of the leader making the assignment. It goes without saying that too much stretch or an impossible goal is demotivating.

• Provide tools and processes to help people with this transition. Companies should take a cue from GE and create a type of “laboratory for learning” during the stretch assignment. They don’t have to use a particular business as this laboratory, but they can use sophisticated training processes that have the same effect. Action Learning, for instance which we have written extensively about, is a process that gives a group of leaders a significant business challenge—a stretch assignment—but also incorporates learning tools and coaching. In this way, people can fail without significantly setting the organization back. To tackle the Action Learning assignment, they need to stretch, but they don’t imperil a business if they make a blunder. Because the stretch involves a real problem or opportunity that faces their company and because management reviews their work on the assignment, they approach it with the same seriousness as they would a real task. (See Action Learning: How the World’s Top Companies Develop Their Leaders and Themselves by David Dotlich and Jim Noel.)

• Stretch your own thinking about whom to stretch. Too often, companies limit stretch assignments to a certain group, such as early-career or high-potential leaders, believing that learning only takes place when individuals are relatively young or that people have the flexibility of youth. As a result, they miss chances to help more senior leaders learn and grow. In any given company, even highly talented leaders get stuck in ruts; they’re doing the same things repeatedly and effectively. A stretch assignment can extricate them from their ruts and motivate them to get back on track to learn something new and different.

With an organization’s support, stretch assignments provide the diversity of experience necessary for leadership growth. We’ve found through our research and coaching of successful people that most leaders cope well with the adversity that comes with a stretch, as long as they don’t pretend to be unrealistically confident and thus inhibit their own ability to reflect or to stay conscious of their new learning.