Experience-Driven Leader Development

Models, Tools, Best Practices, and Advice for On-the-Job Development

Cynthia D. McCauley, D. Scott Derue, Paul R. Yost, Sylvester Taylor

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118767849
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

This book is written for human resource, organization development, and training professionals who need real-world best practices that show who actual workplace learning approaches work and how they can be applied. Co-published with the acclaimed Center for Creative Leadership, this important book offers a compendium of best practices, tools, techniques, processes, and other resource resources to harness the developmental power of work experiences for leadership development. In addition the book includes illustrative case studies of leadership approached that have worked in such forward thinking organizations as Boeing, Microsoft, and Heineken.

Section 1

Developmental Experiences: More Intentional for More People

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Equipping Employees to Pursue Developmental Experiences

1 Intensity and Stretch: The Drivers of On-the-Job Development

Mark Kizilos (Experience-Based Development Associates, LLC)

2 A Leadership Experience Framework

Paul Van Katwyk, Joy Hazucha, and Maynard Goff (Korn/Ferry International)

3 Identifying Development-in-Place Opportunities

Cynthia McCauley (Center for Creative Leadership)

4 Leadership Maps: Identifying Developmental Experiences in Any Organization

Paul Yost (Seattle Pacific University) and Joy Hereford (Yost & Associates, Inc.)

5 Building Organization-Specific Knowledge about Developmental Experiences

Paul R. Bly (Thomson Reuters) and Mark Kizilos (Experience-Based Development Associates, LLC)

6 Expression of Interest: Making Sought-After Roles Visible

Tanya Boyd (Payless Holdings, Inc.)

7 Designing Part-Time Cross-Functional Experiences

Nisha Advani (Genentech, a member of the Roche Group)

8 Creating Project Marketplaces

Cynthia McCauley (Center for Creative Leadership)

Leveraging Existing Experiences for Learning

9 Leveraging the Developmental Power of Core Organizational Work

Patricia M.G. O'Connor (Wesfarmers)

10 Learning Transferable Skills Through Event Planning

Kenna Cottrill and Kim Hayashi (Leadership Inspirations)

11 Pinpointing: Matching Job Assignments to Employees

Jeffrey J. McHenry (Rainier Leadership Solutions)

12 Learning from Personal Life Experiences

Marian N. Ruderman and Patricia J. Ohlott (Center for Creative Leadership)

Creating New Developmental Experience

13 Strategic Corporate Assignments to Develop Emerging Market Leaders

Anita Bhasin (Sage Ways, Inc.), Lori Homer (Microsoft), and Eric Rait (Honeycomb Development)

14 Full-Time Strategic Projects for High Potentials

Paul Orleman (SAP)

15 A Personalized Rotation Program to Develop Future Leaders

Bela Tisoczki and Laurie Bevier (General Electric)

16 Corporate Volunteerism as an Avenue for Leader Development

Shannon M. Wallis (Arrow Leadership Strategies) and Jeffrey J. McHenry (Rainier Leadership Solutions)

17 Developing Socially Responsible Global Leaders Through Service Projects

Mathian Osicki and Caroline Smee (IBM)

18 Stretch Assignments to Develop First-Time Supervisors

Sally A. Allison and Marsha Green (Duke University)

19 Executive Shadowing

Ritesh Daryani (Expedia, Inc.)

20 Leadership Fitness Challenge: Daily Exercise of the Leadership Muscle

Laura Ann Preston-Dayne (Kelly Services, Inc.)

21 Using a Video-Case-Based Collaborative Approach in Leader Development

Nate Allen (U.S. Army, National Defense University)

22 Cross-Company Consortiums: Tackling Business Challenges and Developing Leaders

Yury Boshyk (The Global Executive Learning Network)

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Section Introduction

One of the first questions that you will grapple with as you work to use experiences more intentionally for leader development is this: How can the organization help more people get the leadership experiences they need for development? In thinking about this question, keep in mind the three basic ways that people gain an on-the-job developmental experience:

1. They take on a new job that stretches them in new ways.

2. They add different challenges to their current set of tasks and responsibilities.

3. They more deliberately focus on learning from some aspect of the work that they are already engaged in.

In this section, contributors share the models, tools, and organizational practices that encourage and support these “experience-gaining” tactics. Their interventions seek to:

• Equip employees to pursue developmental experiences,
• Better leverage existing experiences for learning, or
• Create new types of developmental experiences.

A major way to equip employees to pursue developmental experiences is to provide them with models and frameworks that describe the kinds of experiences they should seek to develop as leaders. You can make use of a number of research-based developmental assignment typologies (see Corporate Executive Board, 2009; Kizilos, 2012; Lombardo & Eichinger, 2010; McCauley, 2006; Van Katwyk & Laczo, 2004; Yip & Wilson, 2010). The content of these typologies overlaps a great deal—choosing which one to use is a matter of assessing the best fit to your organizational context. In this section, you'll find descriptions of three typologies and how they can be put to use in pursuing developmental assignments (see Intensity and Stretch: The Drivers of On-the-Job Development, A Leadership Experience Framework, and Identifying Development-in-Place Opportunities). There is also value in creating assignment typologies that are based on in-company research and thus are customized to your own organizations (see Leadership Maps: Identifying Developmental Experiences in Any Organization and Building Organization-Specific Knowledge About Developmental Experiences). A second important way to equip employees to pursue developmental assignments is to create processes that aid their search for a specific type of assignment (see Expression of Interest: Making Sought-After Roles Visible, Designing Part-Time Cross-Functional Experiences, and Creating Project Marketplaces).

You can also seek to capitalize on the developmental potential of naturally occurring experiences inside and outside of your organization, working to better leverage these experiences for learning. You'll find examples of how practitioners frame certain assignments as developmental and provide resources for learning during the experience (see Leveraging the Developmental Power of Core Organizational Work and Learning Transferable Skills Through Event Planning), how they facilitate the matching of new assignments with individuals who most need the learning opportunity offered by that assignment (see Pinpointing: Matching Job Assignments to Employees), and how they encourage development through leadership experiences outside the workplace (see Learning from Personal Life Experiences).

Finally, you can create new types of developmental experiences for employees. Often these experiences are targeted for high potential leaders in the organization—individuals being developed to move up in the organization and take on broader leadership responsibilities. The assignments are typically temporary, full-time assignments outside of the individual's current work setting. And they are aimed at broadening individuals' perspective on the business, developing their strategic thinking capability, or deepening their global leadership skills (see Strategic Corporate Assignments to Develop Emerging Market Leaders, Full-Time Strategic Projects for High Potentials, and A Personalized Rotation Program to Develop Future Leaders). Increasingly, organizations are also looking to company-sponsored service projects in nonprofit and community organizations as a leader development strategy (see Corporate Volunteerism as an Avenue for Leader Development and Developing Socially Responsible Global Leaders Through Service Projects). Action learning projects are another avenue for creating new developmental assignments; more on the action learning approach can be found in Section 3 of this book.

At the other end of the continuum are very short and focused experiences for development. These include experiences that expose individuals to the challenges of working at higher levels in the organization (see Stretch Assignments to Develop First-Time Supervisors and Executive Shadowing), “micro-assignments” that can be carried out in an hour or two and encourage a “learn every day” mindset (see Leadership Fitness Challenge: Daily Exercise of the Leadership Muscle), and opportunities to tackle a job dilemma or business issue in a collaborative learning environment (see Using a Video-Case-Based Collaborative Approach in Leader Development and Cross-Company Consortiums: Tackling Business Challenges and Developing Leaders Together).

The practices described in this section go beyond simply getting people into a stretch assignment. Other aspects of the learning-from-experience process are embedded in many of the practices—for example, matching assignments and individual development needs; enhancing development from assignments by building reflection, feedback, coaching, learning partners, or formal training into the experience; and overcoming organizational obstacles to experience-driven learning. These elements will be revisited and take center stage in subsequent sections of this book.

References

Corporate Executive Board. (2009). Unlocking the value of on-the-job learning. Arlington, VA: Authors.

Kizilos, M.A. (2012). FrameBreaking leadership development. Chanhassen, MN: Experience-Based Development Associates.

Lombardo, M.M., & Eichinger, R.W. (2010). Career architect development planner (5th ed.). Minneapolis, MN: Lominger.

McCauley, C.D. (2006). Developmental assignments: Creating learning experiences without changing jobs. Greensboro, NC: Center for Creative Leadership.

Van Katwyk, P., & Laczo, R.M. (2004). The leadership experience inventory technical manual. Minneapolis, MN: Personnel Decisions International.

Yip, J., & Wilson, M.S. (2010). Learning from experience. In E. Van Velsor, C.D. McCauley, & M.N. Ruderman (Eds.), The Center for Creative Leadership handbook of leadership experience (3rd ed., pp. 63–96). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Equipping Employees to Pursue Developmental Experiences

1

Intensity and Stretch: The Drivers of On-the-Job Development*

Mark Kizilos

Experience-Based Development Associates, LLC

MY COLLEAGUES AND I have worked with a number of organizations to develop experience models that describe the most critical development experiences for their leaders (see Building Organization-Specific Knowledge About Developmental Experience on page 37 of this book). Our work was motivated by the realization that, while experience is acknowledged to be a powerful source of learning, leadership development professionals are generally not able to provide more than the most basic guidance to aspiring leaders who seek answers to two simple questions: “Which experiences do I need to be successful in my organization?” and “What should I learn from those experiences?”

Our client work provided company-specific insight into the most important developmental experiences and the lessons that they teach. However, the approach was resource-intensive—it took a great deal of time and care in each organization. Through the process, we created experience models for several organizations. To do this, we interviewed and held group discussions with more than two hundred highly successful leaders and analyzed nearly 250 hours of interview transcripts.

After looking back at the extensive data ...