Executive Tip! All Strategic- Managed Companies Have a Second Team! It’s the Hard-Skill Competency of Management Depth!

From GW’s Executive Management Workbench…..

Since our pragmatic studies with high-growth clients show that leaders at every level use hard-skill competencies over 90% of the time, you can see why we deduce that in order to become an executive, a leader must master the hard-skill competencies of leadership management.? Soft skills play second fiddle here.

All hard-skill competencies emanate from six functions of high-growth management: Strategy, Planning, Organizing, Leadership, Teamwork, and Control. There are 85 hard-skill competencies, and a leadership manager is accountable to master all of them if she wants to become a top executive.

One of the hard-skill competencies of the function of Leadership is “management depth.” Here’s the definition from the book, Vocabulary For Success.

Management Depth

The management depth of a company relates to the number of individuals and managers who have developed the leadership managerial skill sets of management talent to achieve objectives through and with others and are the “next man in” for positions of increased accountability.

The skill sets for management depth are the competencies of the function of high-growth, with particular emphasis on those competencies of accountability, decision making, communicating, action planning, and using metrics in managing.

It is the accountability of the leadership manager, not HR, to have trained management depth throughout the manager’s unit of the organization.

In my lifetime, I have never seen a championship team that can win championships consistently without a solid second team. You see it in every team sport, and whether it is the male version or the female. Let’s face it, the teams with the most depth always are playing for the championship.

That’s no different from in business. There’s a reason the job market keeps creating 150,000+ jobs every month. Many of you do not realize it, but the DOL is not saying that these are brand new jobs in the marketplace. No, the department of labor counts the number of “job changes” each month, either from departures or internal promotions.

Most CEOs do not emphasize management depth as much as they should, and that’s why you see a company being forced to go outside the company with most key openings. ?If you know the definition of accountability, you know that the line of authority begins with the CEO. He’s as much accountable for having managed replacements as the department managers are.

And don’t place this accountability on HR. HR is not accountable for management depth because the line of authority does not move through HR. It moves through the line managers where the direct reports reside.

The telltale sign that a department manager, or CEO, is not paying any attention to management depth is when the company must go out into the marketplace to replace a key leadership manager who has departed, for any reason.

High-growth CEOs and executives use the following axioms of high-growth in developing their management teams into cohesive units of the organization.?

They found that the progression of an individual within the tenets of management ?affected the management depth of their organization because the higher an individual rose within the company, the less they required specialist talent and the more they required management talent.

So when a top executive leader or department manager departs the company, the real problem is the loss of management talent, not specialist talent!

AXIOM OF Strategic Management Depth: Those companies that implement a strategy to use their current products and services to extend their current markets but do not have management depth to control the growth of the extended market will lose to competitors who have management depth.

One common trait we saw in every “high-growth” company was that they all had a formal succession plan for developing management depth and avoiding the disruption that occurs when a key employee departs the company.? You don’t have to be an executive to create a succession plan, and if you create one at a department level it’s a pretty good indication you’re on your way to becoming one.

GW

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