Since I got excellent advice and food for thought here this spring regarding whether it would be worth it to get an MBA vs. going another route, I am back with another topic for discussion that falls along similar lines.
Some background: I work for a financial institution in NC and I am currently in the process of interviewing for branch VP positions within my organization. Within the branch network, we've gotten very top-heavy with senior employees that are interested in taking that next step, like myself, but there are only so many positions available. I recently had a meeting with my current SVP about my career goals and one of the things that he has tasked me with is "How do we as an organization keep employees like yourself interested and motivated while you're going through the interviewing and selection process, to keep you engaged and to prevent you from getting discouraged?" We recently had a wave of people in these positions retire, and we're expecting another wave in 9 months when our current CEO's term ends and he retires.
There is a real log jam of people seeking upper management positions, and the current options are:
- Stay and wait.
- Leave for an opportunity now.
If we stay and wait, we run the risk of getting complacent, and if we leave, we're losing talent as an organization. Personally, I'm not certain the current leadership has the perspective needed to find a solution for this. When they started, the company was starved for leadership and they had to trust young, passionate people to do the job, so they can't really empathize with those of us that are waiting today.
I believe that part of the solution would be a series of leadership workshops with individuals that have been identified by senior management as having high leadership potential. These workshops could be quarterly and by invite only, and each session could have a different topic that we as potential managers are likely to face and how to find solutions.
My question for those of you with some experience in this: What format would be most effective? What sort of criteria should senior management use to select the participants? Would it be feasible for my organization to develop a curriculum of sorts with a possible capstone-type project that could be used as a resume builder within the company? Any other outside the box suggestions for how to tackle this?
Comments
In my experience - not in the financial industry - if there's a log jam, it's either up or out. Explore outside opportunities while you're still employed and if you see one that excites you then consider it. Better to explore now while you're not under any pressure to accept just anything.
So my wife worked for a financial institution that had a leadership program. It identified the younger, future leaders and would hold meetings, lead capstone projects for the company, and training stuff. Once selected you had a maximum of 5 years in the program, at the end of the year bottom 2 employees were voted out of the program, the top 4 were made officer positions for the next year. So it became a self running thing. Nothing happened if you were voted out, and some volunteered to leave cause they got a promotion and didn't have the time. Or they got promoted to a position not available for the program (VP was not a leadership development kind if position).
Basically it was a way to keep the young leadership involved and helping the company while higher roles were occupied. This was company backed and allowed employees to leave earlier twice a year for their weekend retreat. But it's how they invested in their future.
This sounds decent, so here's a perspective on how to do it wrong.
Not financial services, but my organization did something like this around 10 years ago as a way to keep young talent and develop future leaders. It ended up being a lot of useless "leadership" workshops (think the "trust fall" type of stuff for teambuilding) and in the end whether you participated or not had zero bearing on whether you ended up in leadership (I think about 25% ended up in leadership, but probably would have anyway, 50% left the organization for laterals or non-leadership promotions, and 25% are still there not in leadership).
As someone who took the hard way to become a manager (not sure if I'm considered "leadership" or not - my office runs a major program, but I am not an executive), what I saw was we are terrible at identifying leadership talent.
So in my opinion, an organization has to be good at several things: identifying future leaders, giving them meaningful training or other experiences, and making success count for something, then it's a great idea.
Yes, their leadership building was actually
teamworks and leadership based. One year they learned how to sail then they divided into teams and raced. So the team had to work together and communicate to win. Another year was learning to bake and then they had to cook a meal as a chef and sous chef and so forth. A couple executives came to judge. Those were much better than trust falls. Also there were drinks afterwards so lots of social team building going on. Outside of that they had projects to complete and project leaders.
Many of the leaders in the company came out of the program. But it was more than identifying leaders, it identifying people that were good hard workers that could be molded into leaders. It helped my wife get a lot of experience she would have never gotten otherwise and really helped her in her career even though she left that company.
It is always in a companies best interests to offer courses to help those that qualify grow in their current position and industry. Even if that means you are investing in someone who might now stay. People are going to leave. It happens no matter what you do but by showing that you are investing, typically this leads to keeping top talent.
Rather than give someone a better position, can you give them a better project? You can only learn so much in a leadership workshop; why not just give them actual work to do and promote the person who does best?
My personal belief is that if/when you stop learning and growing professionally, it's time to find a new job. I say that as single person with no kids/dependents, but I think it holds true if your goal is to grow professionally. If you're still growing and learning in your current role, and you're happy with your work and your compensation, then stay. If you're not being paid what you deserve, or you've stopped learning/growing, then it's time to go.
THIS
My organization has developed a version of this. We pull a group of 15 or 20 new leaders into an intensive week long training focused mostly on the organization and on managing change. Then they form 4-5 teams and select a significant challenge that is in our future. They are given 4 months to research, and propose a solution. But the brilliant piece is they have to formulate a set of implementation strategies that take into account organizational culture, inertia an other barriers to change. Presentations are made to leadership and finalists present during our annual conference.
Some brilliant solutions have come out of this work, some not so brilliant ones have bean dropped by the wayside. But in just three years what I've seen is an organization that is learning how to change. We have some very senior, senior leadership and change has always come slowly. But I see hope in these young leaders and their attention to leading and managing change. And we will need it, as recent developments in our industry mean we have some radical realignments ahead of us.
I don't know if that helps any but best of luck.
I fucking love this on so many levels; It's a low risk, high reward way to drive innovation within a company. Additionally, if one of the solutions sticks, you (in theory) can already have the leadership in place to do everything (because you'll be promoting the people who planned it). Beyond that, it rewards driven employees with the opportunity to 'think outside the box' and own a truly difficult problem.
I love this too, and it's really similar what I'm hoping to present to my current SVP. I think that it would be an excellent opportunity to use the "next generation" of leaders within the company as a think-tank and to solve challenges that the company is facing or to identify areas of improvement outside of what an internal audit covers. Each group could be given a list of topics that executive management wants addressed or they could be given the leeway to identify an issue on their own. Now I just have to write it up and present it!
Do you think they would have the balls to pull everyone like yourself together and do an affinity diagram?
The interview process as is is broken. No one on TKP will be able to fix it, but if you get all the stakeholders together to come up with a collective answer together everyone will be more inclined to buy in because part of their voice was heard. Plus it's super fun!
Do what is best for you, If that means you have to jump ship- do it; so long as there is a written offer first. good Luck
You left out the "Laid off after merger" position which was very prevalent after the change in banking laws in late 1980's through 2000's.
Glad to see you aren't just an ass about Hokie Football...
You are correct. Agree
fwiw in the amount of time you took to comment replies to multiple people who all apparently misread the tone of your original comment, you could have just edited the original comment
Your comment reads like something a UVA grad would say. I see that you have such an asshole sense of entitlement that you would go into a thread where someone in the community is looking for advice and then you shit on their industry and literally contribute nothing to the conversation.
Agree. I am like a UVA grad. Thanks
didn't realize you made jokes
I don't. Carry on. You are right
consider me carried on
if you deserve promotion after promotion and you can adequately perform the role into which you are promoted, who cares?
I shouldn't feed the trolls but...
What part of my post indicates that I would be making the jump from teller to VP? Even if that was the case, why does that matter, assuming I am qualified for the position that I'm seeking?
Additionally, my post has nothing to do with the promotion I am seeking and has everything to do with the challenge my senior manager laid out to me. I created this post because TKP is a creative and knowledgeable community, and I hoped to benefit from that, but clearly the knowledge and creativity only goes so far.
Do what is best for your career. In the finance industry, there should be great opportunities for you.
Way to shadow edit your comment to hide why everybody downvoted you. Weak.
The edit is fine and better than the original. Just leave it at that and move on.
Thank you... you get it. Others want to pick a fight- always
you don't often have a jokesy and lighthearted tone around here, so perhaps you could understand how most of us who responded to your original comment came to misconstrue it
an edit to add a clarifying comment is probably best, but i'd much much rather have a stealth edited comment than another 75+ comments of back and forth
The original comment had 2 downvotes. Thanks
They need to look at this from the opposite direction. Why aren't they looking to push out those leaders 9 months earlier? Offer them sweet retirement packages, and get them out of the way of the innovative, younger leaders. Both GE and HP have done this in the past with success.
If you need a few of them to come on as consultants for a few months to ease the transition, that is a cheap price to pay to not lose top talent.
From a career development perspective, you have to do what is best for you. If 9 more months in your current role is too much for you, go interview, see what is out there that you might be interested in. If you don't find something in those 9 months, then your decision is made easier.
So it may be wise to differentiate your leaders into those that want to progress to a VP, SVP, etc. and those that don't. A common misconception is that a leader and productive member of the workforce = want to be an executive right now. For those that do want to take the executive route, things like regional workshops where the leaders discuss and tackle real workplace problems that they can apply to their career path (or other projects to build value to the company) can really help their level of engagement.
For the other group, things like community involvement, training and mentoring, other projects that first group of leaders don't exactly participate in, can keep them engaged with something to strive for.
so true! the transition to management might be "easier" in some industries than others but it's particularly a difficult transition to make in mine, where managing technical projects is very different than actually being a technical researcher who is doing the physical work. everyone in upper management seems like they assume that doing a good job in a technical role means someone is gunning for a promotion "out of the lab"
Yeah there are some companies that I know of the don't have a senior track for technical people because "Why wouldn't you want to make more money in management". That means their technical work force is inexperienced and cheap so they under bid contracts and do bad execution.
But at some point some one wants quality work and you need those senior people "in the lab" so you can execute tough projects. The better places i've worked understand the need for people with 20+ years in the lab.
This x100! I can only speak for the engineering discipline, but some people are just better suited to be technical experts instead of managers. Companies that value those technical experts and pay them well seem hard to come by.