A few seemingly random ideas before getting to the point of this post

  • A couple years ago I was in the running for a position at a company whose product was employee development and tracking. The market need they were filling was that when a position opened up in an organization, they could look at the software and find out who, if anyone, was ready to fill in that role.
  • I’ve got a personal metric when I have people who work for me regarding their growth and development. If they are still working for me in 5 years (and in the same capacity), then I have failed as a lead. Now, let’s just ignore the minor detail about not staying in one spot that long, but it’s still useful to keep that in mind.
  • A month ago I suggested rotating future leaders in test through various parts of the organization in order to expose them to all parts of the business.

Those help illustrate that leadership, and how you develop it is a reoccurring theme with what interests these days. So the recent Fortune article P&G’s Leadership Machine (which doesn’t seem to be online, but was in the April 13, 2009 edition) had a title designed to suck me in. It seems that P&G rarely fills leadership roles externally, but instead has a well developed system for building and tracking it’s future leaders in-house through a program it calls Build From Within. (Ok, its not that originally named.)

  • If I get on a plane next week and it goes down, there will be somebody in this seat in the morning – A.G. Lafley, P&G CEO
  • Each of the top 50 jobs has 3 replacement candidates lined up
  • Loyalty is a key element of what makes the program successful
  • The employee is who chooses the track, not the employer
  • Basketball analogy time: Develop a deep bench – Moheet Nagrath, head of P&G HR
  • When a position opens, they can fill it within an hour
  • Part of the ‘talent review’ process is what they’ve done to train others
  • Of course, the risk of this sort of thing is a lack of diversified and/or original thinking
  • A willingness to train others ultimately determines who advances: If your direct reports aren’t ready, neither are you
  • A manager who isn’t good at developing others doesn’t attract he best talent [to be on his team]
  • Internal reputation is crucial