Newly promoted frontline leaders typically lack leadership readiness. Prevent them from falling off the leadership cliff.
At some point in every Road Runner cartoon, Wile E. Coyote speeds after his adversary well past the edge of a cliff. For a couple of seconds he stands suspended in mid-air staring at the camera in disbelief. Then gravity kicks in, sending him hurtling to the ground in absolute failure.
This scene is repeated every day by organizations that make the decision to promote their technical experts into frontline leadership positions. Lacking better information, they assume that the best technical experts must be the best choice to lead technical experts—an assumption that too frequently sends these new leaders over their own professional cliffs.
Bridging the canyon
Development Dimensions International's (DDI) 2012 Global Leadership Forecast study found that 28 percent of internal leadership promotions fail. The reason why so many first-time leaders fail is because they haven't fully mastered interpersonal skills.
Interpersonal skills are, of course, integral to success in a leadership role. Almost daily, frontline leaders face challenging situations that require them to identify and respond to the interpersonal needs of their teams. For example:
- delegating a challenging task without taking over the assignment
- getting an employee to accept responsibility for correcting a performance issue
- bringing two co-workers together to resolve a conflict
- overcoming resistance to a change initiative.
So what does the research tell us about the leadership skills of newly promoted technical leaders when it comes to these interactions?
Technical experts often are not good leaders
During the past two years, DDI has assessed the leadership readiness of more than 10,000 emerging, new, and existing frontline leaders across nine critical leadership competencies. Our research shows that about one-third of new frontline leaders were promoted due to their technical expertise and that those technical experts were significantly less ready in seven of the nine key leadership competencies.
More than half of these technical experts needed development in the four competencies that require the strongest interpersonal skills: guiding interactions, coaching for improvement, delegation and empowerment, and managing relationships (see sidebar below). These skill deficiencies amount to significant hurdles for technical experts as they try to become effective frontline leaders.
Leading blindfolded
What's worse than 88 percent of your new leaders needing development in guiding interactions? How about half of them being unaware that they need to develop the skill?
DDI asked leaders who completed our readiness assessment to rate themselves on the nine leadership competencies. We then compared their self-rating with the score on an assessment. The results revealed that at least one in four managers has a blind spot in each of the nine competencies (see sidebar below). In other words, they have a higher opinion of their skill in the competency than their actual skill level.
The most prevalent blind spots happen to be in the three interpersonal competencies in most need of development: guiding interactions, delegation, and coaching for improvement. What happens when a leader thinks he is a good leader in these competencies, but is, in actuality, less skilled? It's like heading off to work blindfolded. The leader will be less able to get things done through his teams, which, in turn, will affect his ability to execute.
For example, it is common for technical experts who get promoted into leadership positions to find it difficult to part with former job responsibilities. Think about the sales manager who steps in at the end of a sales call to close the deal or the IT manager who questions the way one of her programmers approaches an assigned task.
Although the intentions are usually good, the end result of swooping in to take over a delegated assignment is less time for the manager to do her own work, and direct reports who feel that the manager lacks confidence in them.
The bottom line is that 89 percent of all frontline leaders have at least one blind spot—with the average leader having three. If you isolate the frontline leaders who are promoted because of their technical expertise, this number jumps to 97 percent with at least one blind spot and an average of four blind spots across the nine competencies.
You get what you seek
The reason why so many technical experts are promoted into frontline leadership positions is because organizations emphasize technical knowledge and experience in the selection process and either don't look for, or inadequately evaluate, those individuals against behavioral leadership competencies, personal attributes, and motivations.
In preparing this article, we were curious about what skills were listed in current job postings, so we sampled 100 job postings for IT managers on Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com. We found that 98 percent of the job postings list specific requirements around technical knowledge and experience.
At the same time, only 45 percent list personal attributes. Few of these personal attributes—such as "exhibits confidence" and "possesses strong work ethic"—are leadership focused. Finally, despite these being frontline leader positions, a mere 29 percent of the postings list any leadership competencies at all.
These percentages don't get much better when we move from job posting to the hiring process. According to Aberdeen, only 74 percent of organizations use some form of behavioral assessment in their selection process for frontline leaders. The same study found that 75 percent of best-in-class organizations can directly attribute changes in profitability to their assessment strategies, compared with just 35 percent of all other organizations. Essentially, assessment helps drive performance and many organizations are missing out.
Keep the assessment data out of the vault
All too often, when someone is promoted, his assessment results get filed away in some deep, dark place never to be seen again. In fact, DDI's 2012 Global Selection Forecast found that only 24 percent of organizations use selection data to help inform development.
This is a missed opportunity for those organizations that promote many technical experts. Not only does leveraging these data give new leaders a better understanding of exactly what they need to develop, it also has been found to build their levels of confidence and engagement—and, more important, accelerate their paths to leadership readiness.
Who can your frontline leaders count on?
Technical experts with significant leadership skills gaps need plenty of assistance to get across the canyon—assistance many leaders don't feel is there for them. Consider these statistics from DDI's Finding the First Rung survey of 1,130 frontline leaders:
33 percent have agreed with their managers on a formal, written development plan.
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46 percent feel that their managers are committed to their development.
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49 percent get sufficient feedback about their performance.
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40 percent are satisfied with their company's leadership development offerings.
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53 percent feel their development assignments are challenging enough to be good learning experiences.
The takeaway is that organizations need to do a better job of supporting new leaders as they plan and execute their development. This starts with improving new frontline leaders' skills, in part through better development planning and providing more support for ongoing development.
The best development plans are really learning journeys
It's clear that managerial support plays a critical role in transforming technical experts into effective, skilled leaders by helping them create and execute a development plan. But what about the plan itself? How do you ensure that development plans lead to better frontline leaders?
Effective development plans start with identifying the skills that need to be developed and then zeroing in on the "how's"—that is, how the skill is going to be acquired and how it's going to be applied and measured back on the job. Successful development requires both formal learning and informal application opportunities—often referred to as the 70-20-10 approach or the "learning journey" approach.
Learning journeys are well-defined series of development experiences designed for participants who engage in the process over time as a collective group. They are successful because they cultivate the basic personal need to interact, discuss, and learn from one another, and apply learning in a safe environment.
For example, take a group of new frontline leaders who all need to develop coaching skills. They go through a coaching workshop together (the 10 in the 70-20-10 approach). One of the leaders returns to her job and must immediately have a discussion with an underperforming direct report. She posts a message on the group's internal social network site seeking advice and quickly receives recommendations from three people and an offer to role-play before the live discussion (the 20). She accepts the offer and then goes into the live discussion more prepared and more confident (the 70). Finally, she shares some of her "aha" moments with her group in case they encounter the same situation later (another 20).
That scenario illustrates how important all aspects of the 70-20-10 approach are when building a learning journey approach. And best of all: It works.
A recent DDI study conducted in partnership with HR.com, Be Better than Average: The State of Frontline Leadership, shows that HR professionals in organizations using learning journeys were overwhelmingly more confident in their frontline leaders' ability to succeed than those using open-enrollment programs (see table). Of the respondents who rated their confidence in frontline leaders as "very high," 79 percent say they use the learning journey approach versus only 21 percent who say they use the open-enrollment approach.
Making it across the canyon
Wile E. Coyote speeds after his adversary full of confidence and vigor; however, in more than 60 years of reruns, he has never made it across the canyon. But your technical experts can. Here are five tips for ensuring your technical experts are on the right trajectory to becoming strong frontline leaders.
- Use focused assessments to accurately diagnose whether they are ready for the role and identify their leadership skills gaps.
- Put processes in place to help them create effective development plans that will help them close their leadership skills gaps.
- Institute learning journeys to promote learning acquisition and continuous application on the job.
- Provide leaders of leaders with the coaching skills to support their leadership development.
- Measure the effectiveness of the entire learning and development program, including how managers are supporting development.
Your technical experts shouldn't have to hang, suspended, over the cliff waiting for gravity to kick in. With the right skills, training, development, and managerial support, they can cross the canyon and realize success as effective frontline leaders.
Percentage of Technical Experts With Leadership Development Needs
Guiding interactions 88%
Coaching for improvement 69%
Delegation and empowerment 68%
Managing relationships 54%
Judgment 37%
Problem analysis 34%
Coaching for success 28%
Influencing 27%
Planning and organizing 20%
Percentage of Managers With Specific Leadership Blind Spots
Guiding interactions 51%
Delegation and empowerment 40%
Coaching for improvement 35%
Judgment 35%
Planning and organizing 32%
Influencing 29%
Problem analysis 27%
Managing relationships 27%
Coaching for success 25%
Source: DDI’s 2012 Global Leadership Forecast
