Reviewed by Liz Peterson
In their book, The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership Powered Company, Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter and James Noel make the point that in our world, there is a greater demand for leaders than the workforce can supply, and that many people have the potential to be leaders. They think that leadership potential can be developed and say that people reinvent themselves. The model they present for developing leaders can be used by the people managing them for “performance management, leadership development, coaching, and succession planning” (page 131).
The authors present managerial-leadership as a pipeline through which one passes in order to be the best leader possible. This pipeline is not straight, though. It bends to create six passageways. The each passageway is a change in organizational position. In order for leaders to develop, they need to change the way they manage and lead in reference to their skills, time applications and work values each time they go through a passageway into another level of leadership.
The six passageways are from managing self to managing others, from managing others to managing managers, from managing managers to functional manager, from functional manager to business manager, from business manager to group manager, and from group manager to enterprise manager. They suggest challenges and potential problems the developing leader might face and offer tips for dealing with these challenges and problems at every passageway. For example, for the passageway from functional manager to business manager the book presents a model called the alignment triangle that is designed to frame the diverse responsibilities of a business manager and remind them of the balance they must have between different knowledge areas. The book then gives a list of sample questions which the leader can ask him or herself at each point in the triangle to check his or her balance, progress and competence as a business manager.
The authors of The Leadership Pipeline suggest that this book provides a better model of developing leadership than others of its kind because it allows the person developing the leaders to pinpoint the specific level where the developing leader has a problem instead of just determining that a problem exists. The most common places for problems in leadership are first-line managers who are spending most of their time doing individual contributor work, business managers who are doing functional work, and group executives who are focusing on business manager work.
The book also cautions against letting people who are tagged as “high-potential” skip levels in the pipeline. They suggest that no matter how high a person’s potential, he or she must experience the different levels in order to acquire the skills needed to be successful in the next levels. They give different strategies for getting full performance that include starting with the boss instead of the subordinate, searching for evidence of an appropriate values shift, using action learning as a primary vehicle for development, and addressing inappropriate performance immediately. The book also contains detailed sections on how the pipeline can be used for succession planning, coaching, and identifying “pipeline failures” or problem areas that would be useful for bosses who are developing the leaders, but probably not for the developing leaders themselves.
In my opinion the authors offer a good approach to management and leadership. The Leadership Pipeline uses management by objectives in a sense because in order for a person to move up through the management ranks, he or she must first master the skills sets associated with their current position. Once they have met the objectives, they should, in theory, be able to move up through the ranks. When we talked about management by objectives in class, I thought it was an inefficient way to measure progress, but in this case I think it will be quite effective. This book offers a system that’s a adapted version of MBO because it does heavily consider what objectives the person has completed (skills he or she has gained). It also takes into account the person’s personality traits which MBO characteristically does not. The Leadership Pipeline provides a solid system of setting goals and objectives, planning actions to be taken, taking those actions, and then evaluating performance through a balance of MBO and looking at personality traits.
Although this book provided a plethora of useful information on how to
develop leaders, I would not recommend it to other PR students for the time
being. The Leadership Pipeline presents valuable information, but is
targeted toward company executives or bosses who are attempting to harness
potential and develop leaders. As students who will enter the workforce on the
ground floor, we are currently learning how to manage ourselves, which is the
lowest level of the pipeline. Some of the information about moving from
managing self to managing others could be stretched to apply to leading a club
or organization, but for the most part the information is for the business
world. Once we are in the workforce, I think the information in this book will
be helpful, but instead of reading the entire book, I would suggest focusing on
the chapter that applies at any given time. PR students who are still learning
how to manage themselves do not need to waste time reading about moving from
group managing to enterprise managing in the business world. When taken step by
step, I this book could be valuable to us when we become PR professionals, but
for current PR students, it doesn’t yet apply.
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