'Coach Kriengsak, I want to spend more time on talent development next year," Varun tells me
"Khun Varun, what prompted you to make this decision?" I ask.
"Coach, I recently read The Talent Masters and that's what has inspired me," he says. In the book, he explains, authors Bill Conaty and Ram Charan write that great leaders invest at least a quarter of their time in spotting and developing other leaders; at top organisations such as GE and P&G, it's closer to 40%.
"What's your plan?" I ask him.
"I want to spend one third of my time developing the key people in my organisation."
"How long have you been thinking about this?"
"I've been thinking about it for the past two years. Unfortunately, I've been busy with firefighting. Amid all the challenges we've been facing, I've noticed that my people have not been effective enough to cope with dynamic change. If I don't do anything it will get worse. So my first priority is to lift their capabilities."
"Who are the target groups?"
"I have two groups. The first consists of direct reports and the second is potential leaders who are not my direct reports — two or three levels down from me."
"Let's focus one group at a time. Which one do you want to discuss first?"
"The direct reports. I have seven department heads reporting to me. Three will retire next year, so the other four are my main focus."
"What are their common development needs?"
"I think all of them are good at their respective functions. The common development need is leadership judgement."
"Khun Varun, leadership judgement has three critical domains: people, strategy and crisis. How are they in each one?"
"I would say two of them need to enhance their people judgement and the other two need to be better at strategy. All four are great at crisis judgement."
"So what is your plan?"
"Even though people may have common needs, each person has a unique personality and style, so I would rather spend time doing one-on-one coaching to be effective. I plan to coach them one hour per person per week in the first three months. Then, I will spend one hour per month for the following three months. That should be enough time to help them upgrade their leadership judgement."
"Sounds good. What about the future leaders?"
"This group consists of 10 people in various departments. Some are management trainees, some the successors to the three retiring department heads."
"Is there a proper development plan for each individual?"
"Yes. Our Human Resources department started preparing them three years ago. Each one already has an individual development plan. Hence, training and coaching probably are sufficient for them."
"How else can you help them?"
"Coaching may not appropriate because they have direct bosses to do that. I think mentoring might be a good approach.
"I think I will mentor them on leadership perspectives. I will have lunch meetings with all 10. For the first three months I will meet with them twice a month, then once monthly from the fourth through ninth months."
"Khun Varun, what could go wrong?"
"When it comes to coaching the department heads, because I'm their direct boss, I might have a tendency to instruct them instead of facilitate their thinking by asking questions."
"How can you prevent that from happening?"
"Coach, I will prepare myself in advance. Each week I will have a coaching session with you before meeting them. Then, the week after, I will report back to you on how well I did it and what I could do better. I think I need you to help me for the first month with four coaching sessions."
"What could go wrong with group mentoring?"
"Since it's a big group, just scheduling a lunch could be difficult. I will ask my secretary to set schedules in advance for the whole nine months and I'll ask them to lock in those times."
"All right. Let's follow up in our next session."
Kriengsak Niratpattanasai provides executive coaching in leadership and diversity management under the brand TheCoach. He can be reached at coachkriengsak@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