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Building Leadership Pipeline: Drotter Model Competency framework: Enhancing Organisational Capability

Arif Shahriar

LEADERSHIP and talent pipeline is a key business issue. I would like to take a few minutes of your time to elaborate on a few related points and to share some of the work that has been done in my previous organisation where I worked for more than twenty years and also in my current organisation. For any business and organisation to move forward and build a rich talent pipeline it is important that the people in key positions have a shared understanding of what they mean by leadership and talent; so that they can progress together as a team.

For most of us, for any average person, the work we do and experience is largely influenced by the people that we work with our seniors, our subordinates, and the people we work with alongside ourselves. If leadership is so important for business growth and competitiveness, then it is only natural that we make a conscious effort to nurture leadership and build a talent pipeline at all levels of our organisation. Rather than simply slipping into a status quo approach, we have to have a model in place that will drive us towards that.

What differentiates one level from another?

SKILL REQUIREMENTS - The new capabilities required to execute new responsibilities.

TIME APPLICATIONS The new time frames that govern how one works.

WORK VALUES - What people believe is important and so becomes the focus of their effort.

A useful tool for defining leadership and talent is the work by a very renowned Management scholar Stephen Drotter. In his book “The Leadership Pipeline - How to build a leadership powered company”, he has outlined a common-sense approach as to how individuals and companies should be led. This framework has been picked up by a number of leading, global companies around the world. Today, I will share some concepts from Drotter's framework as well as parts of the experience that I gathered while working for British American Tobacco and Rahimafrooz.

It is obviously natural that for an organisation to function, different people need to take on different responsibilities in different levels and roles. These different roles and levels are actually different stages and passages of leadership. As people move from one role or level to another, they need to learn new things, acquire new skills, value different aspects of work, and most importantly they need to use their time differently.

It is a common practice in most organisations that the most successful sales officers get promoted as executives, and in turn marketing managers. The highly successful technicians become supervisors, and the best accountants become financial managers. This approach, while recognises performance and achievements, is based on the assumption that a person will continue to be just as successful in his/her new role. This orthodox approach doesn't take into consideration that the required skill set and work ethic of an executive may be completely different from those of a manager in the same function.

Often times we assume that an individual will succeed in a superior or managerial role just because he/she has demonstrated technical capabilities and functional skills in a position. Rather than taking this straight-line approach, we should have a clear chain or hierarchy of leadership positions in an organisation, which blends the leadership attributes, technical skills, and work values required for a particular level or role.

This concept, as shown by Drotter, is the Leadership Passage model. This may sound a little too theoretical here. Let me explain this mode with simple examples. The very first level of the leadership passage is the people concerned with “Managing Self.” These employees are solely responsible for the delivery of their own work. An individual, who has just started his/her career, needs to focus on his/her own work, interact with others in the team, and be accountable for all the actions and decisions that he/she makes.

Moving forward from the “Managing Self” level, an individual may grow in an organisation and become responsible for the performance and behaviour of others. This shift in responsibility commands a significant adjustment in one's time allocation at work, priority setting and interaction at workplace. This switch or changeover or adjustment is called a “turn” in the leadership passage.

The next turn for the people “managing others” is when they become managers of other managers. If you are managing a person who has one or more people reporting to him/her, then you are “managing managers”. This requires a significantly different set of skills and values.

Thereafter, a person may get to manage an entire function; these positions are called “functional managers” and involve managing a whole team, commonly known as a department. A functional manager, someone like myself, works as a top team manager and is responsible for everything related to a function and reporting to the head of business.

After that comes the role of a “business manager”. The business manager needs to lead all people and processes across the business and has a number of “functional managers” reporting to himself/herself.

A business manager may grow in his/her career and get to manage a group of businesses. These roles are called “Group Managers” and lead multiple companies and “business managers.” And finally, the next turn is taken to the “enterprise manager” role, which leads a number of business groups and clusters.

Taking turns and making necessary adjustments throughout the leadership is important. What is more important is the understanding of our own roles and responsibilities. How we perform our own roles is just as important to us as it is to the people who work for us or alongside us. You may ask - why is it important to have a clear and consistent leadership model? Well, it provides us with a specific list of skills, competencies, and values required at each turn taken in the leadership passage. The specific set of expectations out of each role helps achieve role clarity and positively avoids duplicated or overlapped effort.

It also helps us understand what are the development needs of an individual; whether or not that individual has already achieved success in the current role; their state of readiness to take a turn; and what help he/she needs to grow to the next level. These findings make it much easier and less stressful to bring about the adjustments and implement the turn in the leadership passage. Each of the roles needs to be mastered before the incumbent person moves on to the next.

When we evaluate performance, we wish to see if the expectation out of that role has been fulfilled. I will now explain how we utilise the concept of the leadership passage and manage individuals' performance and career. Imagine each role and its performance benchmark as a circle. There are numerous roles in an organisation; and in the leadership hierarchy, there is correlation between different circles. That results in a series of circles in different areas - with one circle above the other.

When a manager is stepping in to do his/her subordinates' work, which the manager shouldn't be doing at the first place, we call that an overlap between circles. It not only causes duplication of work, may also result in a frustrated mindset for the person reporting to the manager.

When there is large gap between circles, it means there is abdication by the manager concerned. This means a non-delivery of performance objectives by both the manager and the reportee. We don't want a situation where there is overlap between circles; nor do we want abdication among circles. What we need for the company to grow is an “alignment” between circles.

Drotter has done extensive research in a number of leading organisations across the world and he has identified some common skills, values, and competencies that are required at each level in the leadership passage. Imagine that each of our roles has a set of performance objectives under different aspects. We can visualise these different aspects as straight lines; which means that inside each circle there are a number of parallel lines. Empirical studies and long on-the-job research have shown that there are a few aspects or dimensions of performance that a professional needs to deliver.

These five areas are:
Business results Our core business objectives, mostly the technical and operational aspects of our respective jobs

Management results The way we prioritise and allocate resources and ensure maximised efficiency

Leadership results The way we manage and motivate and groom the people in our teas, helping them with their career plans, providing our team members with learning and development opportunities, planning succession for our teams etc.

Relationship results Involves building and sustaining human relationship with our internal and external stakeholders; it's mostly a PR aspect that everyone needs to look at from his/her own relative position.

Innovation results We have to ensure that there is an effort to continuously improve, innovate and constantly challenge the status quo. Innovation may mean introducing new things to do, or new ways of doing the things we already practice.

While we perform in our own roles and areas, we try to deliver these five different types of performance. The degree and scale of these five aspects will vary based on the level we are in the leadership passage. To explain this with an example, let's compare the “management result” delivery by people at different leadership levels in the same function and organisation.

An operations manager, who “manages himself”, will simply try to ensure that he stays within the budget, and seek to generate efficiency and savings. The supervisor of this “manager of self” is “managing others” and will have to ensure that the performance delivery of her team members are optimised, the team is optimally utilising its allocated resources, and the team is contributing to the business through enhanced efficiency and savings. As a person proceeds higher along the leadership passage, he/she has to manage a much larger pool of resources and becomes the custodian for a much bigger budget and fund. Thereby, the level of delivery will vary with each turn taken through the leadership passage.

Taking successful turn in the leadership passage requires full performance delivery at current role, achievement of skills and values (competencies) for the next role, and most importantly, successful adjustment into the new role. Competency framework identifies, defines and explains the key and must-have skills or attributes required to be successful in a role. The key attributes will vary depending on the management hierarchy; i.e. a manager who is in charge of a function will need attributes different than that of a front line executive.

The broad list of competencies includes an array of desirable attributes that we wish to see in a capable, successful manager. These attributes can be classified into two groups: leadership competencies and functional competencies.

Management / Leadership Competency: These are general skills required for success in all functions and not specifically for a particular function. These are more behavioral in nature and while they can be taught conceptually in training programs, the learning requires reinforcement through application in practical situations.

Functional Competency: Functional competencies tend to be less behavioral and more to do with solid skills often taught in classrooms or training programs. Also by their very nature, functional competencies are not usually common between different functions and need to be defined individually for specific functions i.e. Marketing, Finance etc.

Common Leadership Competencies are:
1. Employ enterprising spirit
2. Focuses on business results
3. Leads the change process
4. Builds and supports effective teams
5. Builds and manages interpersonal relationships
6. Develops self and others

Functional Competencies are area specific skills that are needed in different functions Finance, Marketing, Corporate Affairs, Manufacturing, IT, Procurement, and HR.

Competency framework is an essential tool for bringing the right people into the organization (recruitment), as well as developing and retaining them for mutual benefit of the business and the individual (Succession Plan, Career Management - IPD).

It is imperative that not only are the human resources retained, but also that the resources that will be recruited into the team in the future satisfy the strictest norms of quality standards against which all employees are judged. As such, a competency framework is a must for any modern day business.

Competency framework helps identify and recruit the “right talent” for an organisation. The right talent needs to be groomed with the right skills, values, and career plan. Acquisition of relevant skills set at each level of the leadership passage is a MUST for organizational as well as individual performance delivery.

(Writer is a Human Resource practitioner with more than twenty years' of work experience at British American Tobacco Bangladesh, British American Tobacco Australasia, and Rahimafrooz Group. He is a Graduate Engineer and MBA, and has had vast exposure to diverse aspects of HRM, employer branding, leadership, and overall strategic management. )