Develop new leaders
To keep the momentum behind your vision for the future, you need advocates within your company’s ranks. In a perfect situation, every person at every location and level of your organization would be a complete self-starter who quickly embraces the mission and vision and never lets up.
But situations are seldom, if ever, perfect. That means you need to develop a support structure of other executives and managers who can continue to reinforce your messages when you aren’t present.
At West, Morel and his leadership team go through a succession planning exercise with the company’s board of directors twice or three times a year. For each management-level employee, the upper management team develops a profile of the person, including a detailed skill set, strengths and areas for improvement. Upper management then works with the manager to address his or her gaps and shortcomings.
“We form a plan to address those gaps and make sure that they have the skills to move on to the next assignment we have for them,” Morel says. “As we go through the process, it’s not only continual feedback from people in their current assignments. It is also keeping them apprised of what we’re thinking of them in terms of their next assignment, understanding where they want to go next as individuals and understanding how we’re going to fill in the gaps we think they have in their work experience. It’s a process you have to constantly tweak with help from your team and board of directors.”
Ultimately, you want to look for management candidates who can take bigger and bigger steps within a company, potentially rising to an upper management position over time. You identify your high risers by giving them successively more and more responsibility and seeing how they respond to the workload. Some people enjoy the added weight placed on their shoulders. Some find that they can only stomach so much. The only way you can separate the two groups is through putting your plan into practice.
“You’re trying to develop a group of individuals at the higher levels to take on broader management responsibility,” Morel says. “It’s pretty significant for someone going from their functional area of expertise and getting them to take on a broader piece of the puzzle, where they have to manage folks who know more about a subject than they do.
“You need to develop people who can take that next step. They might have a high level of skill in their own area of training, but then they need to meld those skills into a workable group that is going to execute against your business plan and strategy.”
Morel says the identification and cultivation of new leaders is one of the most important tasks on any organization head’s plate. You need to not just keep files on your up-and-coming managerial candidates, but you need to really get to know them, know where they excel and where they might have weaknesses. You need to know their personality attributes and flaws. And you can only gain that level of knowledge through spending regular time with them, both interacting with them and observing their behavior in a variety of different business situations.
“It’s almost a subject that you can’t spend enough time on,” Morel says. “It’s one where you need to interact with those individuals and get a very strong gut feeling about their capabilities. Then, you need to talk to the people you trust who are both above and below the individual in the organizational structure.
“What we really emphasize is how people treat their direct reports and how they treat other people in the company. It’s easy to get somebody to do something for you when they work below you in the chain of command. It is a totally different issue when you need to use softer skills to work with someone who is not from your part of the organization.”
How to reach: West Pharmaceutical Services Inc., (610) 594-2900 or www.westpharma.com
