High Potential Development

On a recent Friday morning, a classroom of teenagers at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School broke up into small groups and spent an hour not answering questions about Albert Camus’s “The Plague.” It wasn’t that the students were shy, or bored, or that they hadn’t done the reading. They were following instructions: Ask as many questions as they could, and answer none of them.

When I heard that Deloitte had purchased more than one hundred acres to construct a leader development facility in Dallas, I was stunned. What were they thinking?
 
Then I heard that, in the midst of the great recession, they intended to spend as much as three hundred million dollars in constructing their center. What were they thinking?

A colleague from another business school recommended the book, The Future of Leadership Development, Corporate Needs and the Role of Business Schools, edited by IESE Business School Dean Jordi Canals. She said it helped set the direction for her executive development program and really got her thinking about our profession.

Ever feel like your hard work has gone unnoticed? You’re not alone. Almost half of the full-time employees who responded to an Office Team survey said they would be “somewhat or very likely” to leave their current job if their manager didn’t recognize a job well done.

Mr. Miyagi and Daniel Larusso. Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Dadabhai Naoroji and Mahatma Gandhi. History (OK, and the box office) is full of examples of people who have accomplished tremendous feats—far more than they could have done alone—with the help of mentors.
That's why I find it odd when I see CEOs spending so little time mentoring their employees. You may not find it in the required curriculum of a fancy MBA program but mentoring is crucial to business success.

What does a real-life CEO have in common with the central figures of a fictitious Mafia crime family in The Godfather? According to Justin Moore, CEO and founder of Axcient, plenty. 

Atul Gawande told a fascinating story yesterday at TED about some of the challenges facing healthcare in America. However, as he talked the implications for business and non-profit leaders became crystal clear to me.

This interview with Susan Credle, chief creative officer of Leo Burnett USA, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.

 
My youngest, an 8th grader, was recently caught cheating.
On advice from her parents, Natalie approached the teacher before school to admit she wasn’t prepared. Being the day of a basketball game, she asked for a way to suffer the after-school detention on some other day. The teacher told her “no,” so my precious tax break borrowed a chum’s paper in order to write her own before class.

Unemployment has been high for far too long, and voluntary turnover has slowed to a crawl in just about every sector of the economy. So why are employers worried about a talent shortage?
That's the paradox Deloitte has been tracking since 2010 in its longitudinal survey series, "Talent Edge 2020." The latest report, released in January 2012, asked executives to list their three most pressing concerns about talent. The top concern for corporate leaders was brain drain--over 70% were highly concerned about retaining critical talent over the next year; two-thirds expressed the same concerns about high-potential employees.

Organizations substantially increased spending on learning and development over the past few years, according to the two new reports.
The American Society for Training and Development's 2011 State of the Industry Report finds that organizations in the United States spent $171.5 billion on employee learning in 2010, up from $125.8 billion in 2009 -- an increase of 36 percent.

This interview with Katherine Hays, chief executive of GenArts, a visual effects technology company, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.
Enlarge This Image

Earl Wilson/The New York Times
Katherine Hays is the chief executive of GenArts, a visual effects technology company based in Cambridge, Mass. She says she has learned to step back more and to have her employees become the “owners” of their work.
Corner Office
Every Sunday, Adam Bryant talks with top executives about the challenges of leading and managing. In his new book, "The Corner Office" (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews with more than 70 leaders. 
Q. When was the first time you were somebody’s boss?
A. The first time I had a real leadership position was at Massive, a video-game advertising company that I co-founded. We started that from an idea, and built it into a company with international offices before selling it to Microsoft. You wear every hat at the beginning, and then you gradually hire a team and you begin handing off some of those specific hats.