“Coach Kriengsak, I’m planning to have my chief operating officer succeed me as CEO within the next two years,” Don tells me. “I want to discuss the details of his development plan today.”
“Khun Don, what do you have in mind?”
Don tells me that he likes the 70/20/10 Model developed by Morgan McCall and his colleagues from the Center for Creative Leadership. “According to the model, leadership development derives 10% from the classroom or training, 20% from coaching or mentoring, and 70% from experience,” he says.
“Khun Don, where do you plan to offer classroom training for your COO?”
“Initially, I’d planned to send him for an overseas executive education programme at a school such as Harvard University or INSEAD Business School. But due to budget constraints this year, I’m looking for a local alternative. Do you have any ideas?”
“I recommend Sasin’s Senior Executive Programme,” I tell him. “The last three-week residential programme was held from Aug 11 to 31 last year at Hua Hin. Senior faculty members of the Kellogg School of Management of Northwestern University, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and experts in Thailand are the lecturers.”
“Thanks Coach, I’ll check on the Sasin programme. Now, as for coaching and mentoring, I think you and I should be able to help him on that. What I don’t have any ideas about right now is the 70% that should come from experiential learning. What kind of assignments would be suitable for him?”
“Khun Don, before we think of an assignment, what will be the learning goal for your COO?”
“I want him to learn to deal with ambiguity as much as he can. The next CEO will have to face a lot of it.”
I recommend that Don consult an e-book called Eighty-Eight Assignments for Development in Place by Michael M. Lombardo and Robert W. Eichinger. “There are 88 items on the list. Why don’t you pick from it?”
I hand him my iPad Mini. After he reviews the list, he says, “Coach, I think I can see five assignments that will serve the need for learning leadership in the face of ambiguity.” They are as follows:
Deal with a business crisis;
♦Assign an “undoable” project (last person who tried it failed);
♦Manage a group of inexperienced people;
♦Manage an ad hoc group in a static operation;
♦Manage an ad hoc group of former peers.
“Okay Khun Don, now I think you should choose one assignment that fits these criteria: it has a major strategic component, is currently available inside your organisation, and is intellectually challenging.”
“Coach, I think should assign an ‘undoable’ project. Last year, we had to go live with new enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. The chief information officer (CIO) was the project leader but he failed to get the system up and running. Now head office has told us we must have ERP in place this year.”
“I think that’s quite a challenging assignment,” I say. “I have one concern: How do you ensure that the COO won’t see this assignment as a punishment?”
“I will explain to him how it’s part of his total development plan.”
“What else could go wrong?”
“If he fails at this project, he will lose the credibility with head office.”
“How will you ensure that he will succeed?”
“There were two major reasons that we failed last year: lack of support from the executive committee and lack of cooperation from key users. To help overcome this, I plan for you to coach him on his influencing skills so he will be able to influence all stakeholders.
“In addition, I will act as a sponsor for this project. Last year, I was too busy with new business. Hence, I left the CIO to lead the project alone.”
“Khun Don, is there anything else that might concern you?”
“What if he tries his best and the project still doesn’t succeed?”
“What would you do then?”
“If we try everything and other uncontrollable factors stop us, I can live with that if the COO can tell me what he has learned. I think it will be beneficial for him and the organisation in the long term. As well, I will back him up against head office.
“I learned this lesson from The Google Story by David Vise,” Don explains.
According to the book, one of the reasons that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin hired Eric Schmidt as CEO was that he had failed before. Where others might have seen a weakness, Brin and Page saw a strength: he had failed at a big project while at Sun Microsystems. “For the Google founders, the advantage there was that rather than making mistakes themselves, they could learn from the strategic and tactical errors that Schmidt and Sun had made.”
Kriangsak Niratpattanasai provides executive coaching in leadership and diversity management under the brand TheCoach. He can be reached at coachKriangsak@yahoo.com. Daily inspirational quotations can be found on his Facebook fan page: https://www.facebook.com/TheCoachinth. Previous articles are archived at http://thecoach.in.th