There was an article in the paper about picking and nurturing the next generation of leadership. In the banking context, the type of program being discussed is commonly known as The Fast Track since it is just that up the corporate ladder. Most testing and/or agile teams don’t have a fast track, but the last three paragraphs are pretty good (emphasis is added by me).

*It has to be a two-way street, says Suzanne Gagnon, a professor of organizational behaviour at Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University in Montreal. “The executives have to listen to the employees being developed and also give them that autonomy to do that work on their own, to make mistakes and if they fail, to learn from the failure,” she says.

Prof. Gagnon, whose research includes the impact of internal politics within organizations, also believes that in order for such a program to truly succeed, it needs to be implemented with great care. For example, the selection of high-potential individuals has to be transparent and as objective as possible.

“We have developed a leader profile over the years that details exactly what competencies are critical to us and what experiences are important,” Mr. Toda says. That profile is used both to identify and develop training for potential leaders. “We need to have people who are effective leaders and that means effective collaborators and team players, so bringing people together from a variety of backgrounds and cultures and walks of life onto a team like this gives them some sense of the nature of the bank that they might not otherwise have had.”*

The last paragraph deserves some further commentary. While a profile that you look for is a handy, and likely necessary thing when dealing with a corporation the size that they are, this has groupthink warning flags all over it. Which is fine in some situations, but not where change is necessary. The ability to change, and the acceptance of change are two very important parts of how companies succeed.

And maybe those attributes are part of the profile, but if my experiences with large companies, including Canadian banks is accurate, then it is more about deference to seniority, political connections and race/gender profiling.