Derailment: The Organizational Face

Managers often derail themselves. In addition, they need to look over their shoulders since organizations derail them as well with the following formal or de facto “developmental” processes and beliefs:

1.  Defining development largely as educational experiences and job rotations when this is only 8% of what executives mention (Lindsey et al., 1987).

2.  Moving people so fast they never really finish a job. Like one executive said, “I’ve always had time to fix it but not to have my mistakes catch up with me. I imagine someday they will.” Conversely, some organizations move people so slowly that they master the job and begin to get very bored. (See Gabarro, 1987, for a discussion of time in job.)

3.  Considering vertical movement in one area a meaningful developmental sequence. On the contrary, this tends to stick people in a series of low-challenge jobs or the same jobs over and over. A common pattern among derailers is to go straight up in operations that are doing at least adequately well. Regardless of their other merits, from a leadership challenge point of view, these small vertical jumps are basically more of the same.

4.  Having one failure knock someone off the fast track, when 15% of successful executives volunteered that they derailed (McCall et al., 1988). There was a trend in the CCL studies for successful managers to report more failures and mistakes. After all, future leaders are supposed to be curious, calculated risk-taker types. One former CEO gives a deadpan speech warning young managers of the three biggest mistakes they can make by illustrating them with blunders from his own career.

5.  Loading up the fast track with aggressive, arrogant, independent types who run into trouble later as strengths become liabilities. Early they’re often seen as hard-driving and results-oriented, later they’re often seen as sitting on people, poor team-builders or non-strategic.

6.  Giving lots of results of “what you did” feedback, but little “how you did it” feedback. Studies (DeVries, Morrison, Shullman, & Gerlach, 1981; Kaplan, Drath, & Kofodimos, 1985) indicate that fast-track managers are less likely to get “how” developmental feedback—they typically move fast and work for bosses who also move fast. I’m sure all of us have spoken with managers who got their first “how you did it” feedback when they derailed.

7.  Our achievement-oriented society and compensation systems equate success with moving up instead of moving around to confront new leadership challenges. All the developmental jobs executives cited were tough challenges; only some were promotions, making effective career paths in reality a zigzag instead of a vertical arrow.

8.  Confusing basic intelligence, technical and functional expertise with the ability to learn new patterns from experience when these are not the same attribute. In studies at Florida State and Yale, what Wagner and Sternberg call “street smarts” is most related to various measures of actual performance and “street smarts” is unrelated to measures of intelligence. Many organizations hire on grade point average, which can be predicted fairly well from intelligence tests but which doesn’t predict actual performance well. To the extent that organizations ignore “street smarts”—the ability to use one’s intelligence in practical situations—they may select and develop the wrong people (Wagner & Sternberg, 1985, 1987).

Many entry-level managers and professionals are quite naive. They have little notion of leadership or how organizations actually work. For example, in some of John Kotter’s work at the Harvard Business School with MBA students—90% of whom had business experience—46% were judged to be naive in their assessment of a complex business case (Kotter, 1985).

Many bump along, piling up technical and functional knowledge, trying to get promoted, but gaining their leadership perspective by chance. Without help, many talented people end up narrow in experience, indifferent learners where leadership perspective is concerned, with only hit or miss feedback to guide them. Such people—who are numerous, not few—often get into trouble or actually derail; and when they do, few organizations relish the confrontations necessary to clear the air. The sad truth is that many Michelles would go on to derail.

In contrast, the CCL studies found that some combination of three differences distinguished successful from derailed executives:

•  They gleaned useful feedback on their performance, largely from reflecting on their successes and failures on the job.

•  They had greater variety in the leadership challenges they faced.

•  They were, or were helped to be, avid learners of new management behavior which could lead to more of a balanced perspective (McCall et al., 1988).

Following is a depiction of what organizations can do to prevent derailment by more actively managing the development of their managers. We will discuss three topics, which are further subdivided into eight recommendations: getting quality feedback to managers on an effectiveness and derailment profile; increasing the variety of experience for managers; and creating a more active learning environment for managers.