Perpetual Leadership Bench

When it comes to identifying their own successor, Japan CEO’s whom I know often find themselves in exile in a land of no good options. Yet it does not have to be so.

What do I mean by “no good options?”

The CEO’s own internal leadership bench yields no unquestionably qualified candidate, despite a number of good performers. You can choose the best of the bunch and hope he or she rises to the occasion, yet even with additional support, depending on the candidate, this is a risky proposition.

An external search however can take a lot of time and results are unpredictable. In one company I know it took over a year to find a qualified candidate, and even then the candidate changed his mind and took a different role. In the meantime, the current CEO is tied down in his or her role unable to move on, or the business is otherwise left leaderless, or at best with a leadership deficit.

A global company can assign a qualified interim CEO from elsewhere in the business as a temporary fix, like a regional CEO who oversees the business in several countries including Japan. Yet regional CEO and Japan CEO are both full-time jobs. In my experience, a regional CEO can excel in his or her own job or in the interim CEO role, but not in both at the same time. One or the other ends up neglected, while an attempt at balance often results compromising both roles, at least to some degree.

You can decide to lower standards in the interests of expediency, and hope for the best. In my experience though, the only thing worse than a business without a leader is a business with a mediocre one.

Even hiring a competent CEO from the outside or otherwise tapping an international executive from elsewhere in the global business to serve as expat CEO in Japan can come with hidden costs. At one European company I know, local mid-level and senior-level managers complained that there is no career path to the top of the business.

“The top jobs are reserved for outsiders and expats,” one explained. “Internal candidates never seem to be good enough!”

One manager half-seriously jested his chances for a C-level role would be improved if he quit the company and then re-applied from the outside. The best and most ambitious local managers often leave for opportunity elsewhere, exacerbating an already dire dearth of leadership bench internally.

I wish I could tell you otherwise, but there is no fast way out of the Land of No Good Options—no helicopter rescue extraction. You will have to hike your way out, but the good news is I can tell you what is needed to make the trek and ensure you never end up stranded there again. Below are Steve’s Four Imperatives for Perpetual Leadership Bench.

1. Make direct report’s duties include in some way the duties your role, particularly if these require capabilities he or she does not yet have. My most successful clients involve mid-level and senior-level managers in strategy development and decision making, well before strategic thinking is an essential requirement of the job for example. At some point, outstanding strategic thinking will be critical. Best to start preparing people now, rather than just hope they learn through osmosis. A Japanese executive at a company I know was shortlisted for succession at the Japan office of a European company. She was smart, excellent at her current job to be sure, yet executives in the head office had misgivings about her strategic thinking She was too operational in her thinking. Strategy was decided at the head office independently. Her job was implementation, and she was good at it. She was never involved in decision-making discussions around strategy. Yet somehow, other executives had expected her to pick up a strategic thinking capability nonetheless. When I asked one of the executives in the headquarters how many people in similar roles to her had the strategic thinking capability required for advancement, the number was less than ten percent. It does not have to be that way.
2. Every leader, no matter the level, must be a mentor and coach to his or her staff, starting with you. Leadership cannot be trained. It must be coached, and the coaching is only effective if the person being coached is actually leading a team of people, no matter how small. Whenever I ask a leader about how he or she learned to lead, he or she often cites a boss held in high regard who advised, mentored, and coached, even if was never explicitly called coaching. In my experience, the fastest way to develop leadership bench at every level is to make coaching and mentoring one’s own staff part of your company’s way of doing things. Make coaching part of the job. Start by coaching your minus-one reports. Also, teach them how to coach their direct reports so they can do the same, all the way down the line. Some people are natural coaches, but most of us have to learn. So be prepared to coach your people in how to coach, and if you are uncertain yourself how to coach, drop me a line and I will point you in the right direction.
3. Every leader no matter the level must begin cultivating a slate of successors from day one as part of the job, starting with you. The best time to invest in developing leadership capability of your people is when there is no urgent need. Even though succession might seem to be years off, start investing in candidates now, while you have the runway to do so. Ideally, you always want to be in a position of having a slate successors, and not just one, about whom you are reasonably confident you could hand off the business when the need arises. Often that need arises sooner than you think. Head office executives can make snap decisions to recall expat CEOs or transfer them to higher priority posts, you might decide for one reason or another you unexpectedly need to leave Japan, and you might want to take on an attractive opportunity with another employer but feel ethically bound not to leave in a lurch when your employer has few or no options for replacing you. No matter what, leadership bench when you don’t need it serves you. Investing in the capabilities of your direct reports make them better at their current jobs, resulting in better results for the business making you look good, and fewer mundane issues that require your intervention..
4. Employees with no staff must serve as a leaders in some capacity as part of the job. Building out your leadership bench from the very bottom of the organization creates ample leadership bench at higher levels. As mentioned above, leadership cannot be trained. It must be coached, and the coaching is only effective if the person being coached is actually leading a team of people, no matter how small. For employees who have no staff, ensure that as part of the job they lead a team, even if it is just a short-term project that does not take all of their time. The earlier you can start in cultivating leadership capability the better.

If you lead a business and you have yet to do any or all of the imperatives above, start now regardless of whether you find yourself in the Land of No Good Options or have yet to wander in.

And if you happen to be one of those people who thinks there just simply isn’t enough leadership talent available in Japan, let me dissuade you of that notion. There is plenty of leadership talent in Japan. They work in a business that invests in them. Whether or not that business is yours is entirely up to you.