Page 151 - Roy W. Rice - CEO Material How to Be a Leader in Any Organization-McGraw-Hill (2009)

132 • CEO Material: How to Be a Leader in Any Organization

If you think, as a leader, that you are doing all the investing neces-
sary in your people when you pay for training, coaching, assessments, and
so on, you are shortsighted. All that is inconsequential to people com-
pared with being made to feel good about what they bring to the table.
Letting them make mistakes so as to learn and correcting their behavior
without attacking their character is what develops people and will cause
them to follow you.

I won’t let a person feel like a failure, which doesn’t mean they can’t
experience failure, but I won’t let them dwell on it.

Develop Successors

You cannot move up and along unless you move others up and along
too. Prepare people not just to do your job but to be a leader in general.
This is what was said about one CEO’s outside of work activity by a
board member: “Todd’s a very good tennis player, and he used to spend
time teaching young people tennis. That doesn’t do your own game any
good, . . . but that’s how you bring people along.”
People are sometimes afraid that growing a strong successor will
enable that person to take their job. The fact is that you need one or two
people who could do your job for you to move up/on. If you don’t have
successors, you’re not doing your job.

Like water pipes, you’ve got to have people moving through.
It is a huge mistake to have no other option and limited considera-
tion of developing one. It’s a management failure if successors aren’t
in place.
You can’t move up if no one is there to fill your void; you are not a
leader if you leave people in the lurch. If your promotion will leave a void,
and you haven’t gotten anyone prepared, you may not get the promotion
for that reason alone.
You don’t have to go to the extreme of one CEO, who said, “I hire
smart people so I don’t have to do the work.”
Succession planning experts say that a well-managed company has
six C-level candidates for every C-suite job in the organization. How
many do you have in line right now?