The High-Potential Leader

How to Grow Fast, Take on New Responsibilities, and Make an Impact

Ram Charan, Geri Willigan

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119287063
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Set your sights on High-Potential leadership and help your organization thrive In today's tumultuous and rapidly evolving business environment, High-Potential leaders are in high demand. Do you possess the relationship skills, strategic vision, innovation, and determination needed to thrive as a high-potential leader in your organization? New York Times bestselling author Ram Charan answers that question and helps you hop on the fast-track to leadership success in this insightful guide. Traditionally, leaders have risen up through the ranks based on their cognitive abilities, analytical skills, thoroughness, and even perfectionist tendencies, but as modern businesses have moved to a more digitally-driven model, the criteria for leaders has markedly changed. The High-Potential Leader explains the modern business climate while highlighting the critical role relationship building, communication style, engagement, and ability to motivate and bring out the best performance in others play in becoming an impactful leader. Whether you're just embarking on your leadership journey or are ready to make the leap to the next leadership level, Charan's real-world lessons and practical advice will help you discover who you are as a leader, chart your path, accelerate your growth, and ultimately, become the high-potential leader your organization needs to succeed.

1
High-Potential Leaders Are Crucial to Helping Businesses Adapt and Thrive in the Digital Age

If you are one of those leaders who has high potential to lead a large, complex organization, this is your time. Companies need you. Get ready to accelerate your growth by taking charge of it. This book will show you how to build the skills and capabilities you’ll need, and how and when to make big moves that will get you ready and battle test you.

If you’re an HR expert charged with building your company’s leadership pipeline, your job must change. You need a new approach to find and develop leaders who can deal with the immense complexity and challenges businesses face. Using this book as a guide, you will be able to redefine leadership potential and let your high-potential leaders set their own paths. The last chapter will help you rethink your role in supporting them as they drive their own exponential growth.

The Urgent Need for High-Potential Leaders

The biggest concern I hear among senior leaders today is, How can we stay relevant in this increasingly complex and fast-moving world? The truth is, some can’t. They’re not equipped to help their companies reinvent themselves for the new game. Nor are the leaders next in line, who’ve been groomed to fit the same obsolete mold.

Companies big and small are coming to realize that it will take leaders with a different way of thinking and different skills to reinvent the business. They are having to redefine the very notion of what a successful leader looks like. Now the race is on to find those with high potential to lead the company onto new paths in a world of constant change.

You’ve heard it before—the changes being wrought by things like digitization, algorithms, and data analytics will be as radical as the Industrial Revolution. We’ve already seen companies such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon cause revolutions in consumer behavior and reach the stratosphere in market value in record time. More of these are yet to come, led by people with the capacity to conceive and grow them. In a decade, the $72 trillion global economy is on a trajectory to be 50 percent greater than it is today. Products and services not yet invented will give consumers entirely different experiences and make some companies obsolete.

This is a time for leaders who can thrive in the face of relentless change, complexity, and uncertainty. Many companies have such leaders buried at lower levels. They need to find them, develop them, and find ways to use them to help the company adapt. And they need to move fast on this. “Born digital” companies are on the prowl and will gladly poach whatever high-potential talent traditional companies overlook.

High-potential leaders themselves shouldn’t just sit back and wait to be discovered. They should decide for themselves whether they have what it takes to someday take a large team, business unit, function, or the whole corporation to new heights and make a plan to ready themselves to create the future.

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